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BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 




It seems to flow away from under your feet. You look out over the 
trees to a valley, checkered with green pastures and brown squares 
of ploughed land, with here and there a white house. See page 2g 



BARN DOORS AND 
BYWAYS 

BY 

WALTER PRICHARD EATON 

it 

Author of "The American Stage of To-day," etc. 

PICTURES AND DECORATIONS BY 

WALTER KING STONE 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 






Copyright, 191 3 
By Small, Maynard and Company 

(incorporated) 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



©CI.A357932 



TO STELLA 

Two rovers of the windy, world were we, 
From storm-scarred summits piled against the blue, 
To salty towns where crooked lanes peeped through 
Their gray, slant shanties at the level sea ; 
Each byway beckoned that our feet were free ; 
Sack was the air of deep-drawn, heady brew ; 
And every dusty road-side flower that grew, 
A welcoming banner flown for you and me. 

That woman, look, the lying cheek and hair ! 

The hand that grasps her arm, bejewelled, gross ! 
These roaring slits of streets have sucked the air. 
Why did our sweet days end and star-hushed nights ? 
The throng has pressed you from my side — draw 

close — 
I cannot see you, Dear, for all these lights ! 



The papers collected in the volume were written 
in many moods, and in many places, during the 
past half dozen years, and for the most part pub- 
lished in various magazines: — Barn Doors, Roads , 
Rivers, The Harbor, and A Berkshire Winter, in 
Scribner's Magazine ; Washington Square — a Medi- 
tation, in the Atlantic Monthly ; The Dismal Swamp 
and Night, in Harper's Monthly; Bird Environ- 
ments, in Harper's Bazar ; The Abandoned Farm, in 
The American Magazine ; The Landscape that Flows, 
in Collier's Weekly; In Old South County, in Outing ; 
Roadside Gardens, in House and Garden, and Wild 
Life in New Tork, in The Outlook (issue of April 2, 
19 10). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the 
editors of these publications for their kind permis- 
sion to reprint. 

W. P. E. 

Stockbridge, 
Massachusetts 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I Barn Doors i 

II Roads 20 

III Rivers 41 

IV The Landscape that Flows .... 62 
V Bird Environments 81 

VI The Harbor 94 

VII Wild Life in New York 115 

VIII Washington Square — a Meditation . 134 

IX In Old South County 151 

X The Dismal Swamp 178 

XI The Abandoned Farm 210 

XII A Berkshire Winter 238 

XIII Roadside Gardens 257 

XIV Night 279 



V 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

It seems to flow away from under your feet. You 
look out over the trees to a valley, checkered 
with green pastures and brown squares of 
ploughed land, with here and there a white 
house. See page 29. Frontispiece V* 

1 

FACING PAGE 

At the other end, down the vista of the golden hay, 
the little west door pierced through and held a 
landscape of surpassing charm 6 

Ahead the stream winds into the mystery of the 

morning 54 \/ 

The window framed a dark, spruce-clad mountain 

wearing a pink hood 68 v 

Then on the stillness suddenly rings out the inde- 
scribable fairy clarion of the hermit-thrush, the 
most beautiful sound in nature, the soul of the 
woods made audible 90 v 

A pigmy tug runs on ahead, like a little dog, and 
even when her towering prow and lofty stacks 
are visible, her stern is lost in the mystery . . 106 * 

Face right, and forget the rest! That is my motto 
when I hunt the wilderness in New York. The 
practice brings me much comfort 130 v 

To the north, where the dusty vista of the Avenue 
began beneath the white arch, that perfect 
block of houses, red and sunny and comfort- 
ably homelike for all their dignity, laid its level 
cornice line against the blue sky 138 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Four miles away you catch the yellow line of the 
sand-bar, laid as with a ruler from east to west, 
and beyond that the blue Atlantic, with Block 
Island like a faint mirage on the sky-line . 172 

Giant tree-trunks block your path 198" 

An abandoned farmhouse sits in the fields under the 

shadow of the sweeping wall of the mountain 214 

The next day we woke into a picture-book world 

of sunshine and dazzling white 240 

There were no motor tracks in the road here, since 
it leads only to a little pond and a farm or two, 
ending against the wooded hill 258 

Night 280 



BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 





BARN DOORS 
,E all, I suppose, have some precious little 
pictures stored away in our memories with 
the magic of childhood or the open world about 
them, pictures that flash upon our inward eye, like 
Wordsworth's daffodils, and bring pleasure and 
the dancing heart. It was Wordsworth's genius 
to feel so profoundly that his pictures persisted in 
memory till he could transcribe them into a 
poem. Called the poet of tranquillity, his tran- 
quillity was like Teufelsdrockh's, that of the spin- 
ning top. More than all others, he is the poet of 
tremendous emotion. And it was in an effort to 



realize with true intensity of feeling my own 



2 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

stored impressions of natural scenes that I came 
to recognize how large and how beautiful a place 
is filled in my memory by barn-door landscapes. 
They have been coming back to me one by one 
since I saw Moosilauke between golden, dusty 
w T alls of hay the other morning, coming back with 
an aura of enchantment upon them, coming back 
from forgotten childhood, from careless tramps 
down world in autumn, from all my country yes- 
terdays. A little gallery of barn-door landscapes, 
of peeps into the ideal — for every barn-door 
landscape is a perfect composition! — they are 
very precious to me now that I have sorted and 
arranged them, hung them, as it were. I wonder 
if others could not do equally well in the galleries 
of their memory? 

The earliest barn-door vista of which you have 
recollection was not many miles from Boston, 
and there looms in the foreground a great yellow 
stage-coach swung on straps, that used to ply be- 
tween Reading and North Reading until the trol- 
ley superseded it hardly a generation ago. It was 
your grandfather's barn that housed this coach, 



BARN DOORS 3 

after it had deposited you at grandfather's gate 
across the road, beneath the balm-of-Gilead tree 
that made cut fingers a pleasure. Of course, with 
only an eager look over the road, where the hens 
were scratching in the dust, you went right up 
the path and in the door to see grandfather, who 
sat in a high-backed rocking-chair by the kitchen 
window. After you had greeted him and grand- 
mother had given you a kiss and a cookie and 
you had climbed up one step into the dining- 
room, then up a steep flight of stairs that led out 
of the dining-room like a closet, and then gone 
down three steps into a chamber that smelled 
curiously musty, and washed your hands with 
water from a pitcher with pink roses on it, you 
rushed excitedly out to the barn — and got your 
hands dirty again. For you did n't stop to look 
at barn-door pictures then. You dashed to pat 
the horses' noses, you climbed into the hay, you 
investigated the feed-boxes, you asked Fred if 
you could pitch bedding to-morrow. Then you 
fell out of the barn by the rear door, a drop of 
eight feet that landed you in perilous muck, and 
ran down the slope to the saw-mill, the pungent 



4 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

odor of the fresh-cut wood gladdening your nos- 
trils, the rhythmic screeches of the saw sounding 
like music in your ear. You watched the men 
ripping the logs into boards for a while and filled 
your shoes with sawdust as you climbed the great 
pile of it to put your hand in front of the blow- 
pipe and feel the sting of the hot particles as they 
peppered forth. Then you looked down-stream 
longingly to the willows. When you got back 
to the house for dinner your hair was wet. 

It was later, after supper, perhaps, or as you 
strolled aimlessly about one morning waiting for 
somebody to go fishing, that the barn-door pic- 
ture claimed attention. Even then you gave it 
no conscious thought; it was just there, a part 
of all this pleasant life that surrounded you. 
But you came to look at it two or three times a 
day. The barn stood east and west, virgin of 
paint, a lovely mouse gray. The great east door, 
when the yellow coach did not block it, framed a 
dim interior with walls of dusty, golden hay, and 
a white hen or two, perhaps a rooster with a red 
comb, strolling about the floor making sleepy 
sounds. A pungent smell came forth that you 



BARN DOORS 5 

loved. And at the other end, down the vista of 
the golden hay, the little west door pierced 
through and held a landscape of surpassing 
charm, a corner of the mill roof, a graceful 
willow, and far away the dome of a green hill 
against the blue sky. If you went to the right or 
the left of the barn the picture was not the same, 
there was more of it, unpleasant details obtruded. 
Just why, it never occurred to you to ask, but 
that barn-door landscape was for you the es- 
sence of things. You watched the sunset through 
the hay while the rest went up on Huckleberry 
Hill. They thought you wanted to see Fred milk 
— and maybe that was partially the reason. 

It was a year later. You were tired because 
the ride had been a long one, and when the train 
finally reached your destination and you climbed 
into the mountain wagon you were cross into 
the bargain, for a thunderstorm was gathering 
down, and your first sight of real mountains, 
dreame3 of for months, promised to be spoiled. 
The wagon climbed uphill it seemed for inter- 
minable miles between walls of trees, birches 
taller, straighter than you had ever dreamed, 



6 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

giant hemlocks and spruces, and the thunder 
rolled ominously in the distance. But never a 
sight of any mountains greeted your impatient 
gaze. Finally you came out on the top of the 
rise, and there was a valley below, and across it 
the clouds seemed to be trailing in the tops of 
the trees. " There are your mountains/' said 
your father. "Where?" said you. You saw 
nothing but the clouds in the trees. " It 's com- 
ing ! " said the driver. A white mist was walking 
across the valley and overhead all was black, the 
lightning flashed, the thunder echoed. The 
driver pulled down the hoods just as the rain hit 
the wagon with a swirl, and you lurched down 
the slope in semi-darkness. Suddenly the driver 
turned the horses sharply, and you dashed into 
a barn, into the hot smell of hay, while the rain 
thundered on the roof and the wagon dripped 
upon the floor. You were to wait there till the 
storm was over. 

There was a little door at the far end of the 
barn, left open with a bar across. Through that 
you looked down a slope steeper than any you 
ever saw to a ravine where water ran, but beyond 




At the other end, down the vista of the golden hay, the little west door 
pierced through and held a landscape of surpassing charm 

See page j 



BARN DOORS 7 

that was nothing but the white wall of the rain 
and clouds in the trees. Presently a mystery was 
brought to pass. The white wall of the rain 
receded. The clouds lifted from the trees. As 
the world grew lighter the clouds lifted higher' 
and higher. Fascinated, you watched them roll 
up like a giant curtain at a play, and ever as they 
rolled beneath them were more trees. Did the 
hill go up forever ? As the first sun shaft, level, 
for the sun was now near to setting, shot into the 
ravine and the trees shot back flashes of diamond, 
the clouds rolled up quicker, higher, blew off into 
nothingness with a whisk of vapor, and before 
your astonished eyes the trees went up, shoulder 
on green shoulder, and then the rocks, and then 
the sharp summit against the sky. And all this 
you saw through the little barn door while the 
horses stamped behind you and your father 
talked with the farmer in dim, far-off tones, and 
there was the smell of hay. 

You looked back lingeringly as the wagon 
drove out on the sloppy road, into the chilled air. 
Your mountain still shot up in the middle of the 
picture. Outside, you saw other mountains, 



8 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

higher, blue, huddling into the distance. But 
none of them was so wonderful as that behind, 
nor ever would be. It came out of the mist of 
rain ; it came framed alone. 

Years passed before you became a real phi- 
losopher and learned to loathe motor-cars. There 
was the tang of autumn in the air, apples ripened 
by the roadside, and in the night when you awoke 
you could hear them falling in the orchard. Dis- 
daining all conveyances, most of all the loathed 
motor-car — which, under any circumstances, 
you could not afford! — you tramped up and 
down the clean country and forgot there were 
such things as towns, forgot, even, that sooner or 
later you must return to one of them, the largest 
and the ugliest, and plunge once more into the 
hurry and the frenzy of its artificial life. Now 
and then inhabitants of this town, in goggles and 
veils, flashy and loud-mouthed and too obviously 
well-to-do, purred expensively by you when from 
necessity you were forced to pound your feet 
along a main high road to reach the next de- 
lectable by-path. You glared at them, brutal re- 
minders of things forgotten, and shrank up 



BARN DOORS 9 

against the bushes, while they, disdainfully glanc- 
ing at you as at a tramp, tore on in dust and smell. 
After they were out of sight you came out on the 
road again and resumed your easy, swinging 
stride, watching for the red gleam of an apple- 
tree that you might forget the smell in the acid 
aroma of its fruit. 

Have I said that you had a companion? Ah, 
but you did, quite the most wonderful companion 
in the world ! And she, born and reared in that 
smoky city beyond the horizon, in that city of 
dreadful night, had never known the country 
except as a summer boarder knows it, had never 
watched the virgin spring come up from the 
south leaving violets where it trod, nor autumn 
paint the woods and bring down the butternuts 
on frosty nights when the stars are alive. How 
wonderful it was to her! How these days of 
windy clarity and soft ripeness, these nights of 
silent, hushed star talk, these miles of white 
road and doming pastures and woodland ponds 
dancing in the sun or bearing on their bosoms 
the reds and golds of mirrored trees, caught her 
up, enthralled her, melted into that other mys- 



io BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

tery of our human relationships that was open- 
ing to her and you, and made both more wonder- 
ful and dear. Sometimes as you watched her 
swinging along, the wine of autumn in her little 
legs that it seemed she could not tire, her face 
tilted up to the wind as if she must drink of it, 
she seemed to you almost some one that you had 
never known before back there in town, with 
trailing skirt and bristling defences of propriety. 
That had been the shell of her; here the real 
being came to birth, the dear pagan soul that 
laughed to meet its brothers, the sun and the 
wind. And when she splashed white feet in a 
brook, as a precaution all trampers take, they 
were Dryad feet, and you caught her with sud- 
den strange alarm to your breast, as if she might 
vanish from you up that green, mossy cloister 
of the brook. But she laughed, and melted, and 
grew warm and silent in your arms. Then happi- 
ness that hurt for very sweetness swept over you 
both, and for a mile you tramped on hand in hand, 
nor thought to mind the farmer jogging past 
with apples to a cider mill. 

It was somewhere in New England that you 



BARN DOORS n 

found the barn door ; but of course you have no 
intention of telling the exact spot. You had been 
tramping since morning, through pleasant, roll- 
ing country, getting finally on a back road that 
led up through second growth timber for some 
miles without sign of house nor any chance to 
get a peep at the country. But at noon you 
emerged on the other side of the divide, and a 
pasture slope to the left invited to a view. A 
cow watched with mild curiosity as you climbed 
over and your companion crawled under the bars. 
At the summit was the view — and such a view ! 
Sweet, gentle, yet wide and windy it was : green 
pastures cut by even lines of trees which marked 
the roads, domed hills with orchards climbing 
up, houses here and there with mouse-gray barns, 
a white spire far off, a pond to the south, another 
smaller pond at your feet, and opening toward 
the sun a gentle valley between the billowing hills 
mile on mile to the blue distance and the faint 
smoke of a town. And right beside you, set on 
the ridge like a watch tower, was a sentinel chest- 
nut, its upper branches scarred by the lightnings, 
its enormous trunk, fifteen feet in circumference 



12 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

measured by your belt, looking like a pillar of 
granite. A low limb, itself as large as a tree, 
tempted, and you ate your lunch up in its shelter,* 
swinging your legs. The map showed only five 
miles more to go, and there was no hurry. Why 
not strike out when lunch was done across that 
great pasture at your feet, ignoring the road? 

So that was what you did. And you were filled 
by turns with the enthusiasm of the artist and 
the golfer. Such billowing stretches of close, 
perfect turf, hardly needing a mower, with moist, 
level hollows where the greens would never dry 
up ; and then that daring pond carry, with a long 
brassey up the slope for a par four! Then sud- 
denly the slender lines of an elm rose out of a 
corner in the wall, spread, burst into leafage, 
casting long, cool shadows to your feet, and you 
were all joy for the perfection of its springing 
grace, wondering if any wrist was firm yet flex- 
ible enough to sweep the image of those lines 
across the virgin paper. You were tireless on the 
grateful turf; you bounded. She said she ex- 
pected you to roll over and nibble grass any 
moment, and you Hid compromise by rolling over. 



BARN DOORS 13 

And then you came to a cornfield where the giant 
stalks twelve feet high were not yet cut down, 
rustling stiffly in the wind. You took her in 
among them, a new experience for her, and her 
voice became hushed as she wandered down the 
narrow lanes, the world shut out, in a sort of 
miniature wilderness. She said it made her feel 
very small, as if she had eaten a bit of Alice's 
cake. 

So, through the corn, you came unexpectedly 
over a little ridge and out in somebody's back 
yard. The house belonged to the days of the 
Revolution, and it was preserved in all the simple 
perfection of its solid outline, its few ornamenta- 
tions — the Doric door frame, the Greek cornice, 
the heavy window-caps — in perfect repair and 
colored just enough in contrast to the olive brown 
of the wide spruce clapboards to pick them finely 
out. There was no flaw in the proportions of 
the dwelling, the great square chimney and the 
long roof being held up with easy grace by the 
simple frame, a house at once solid, beautiful, 
and gracious. Three giant elms as old as it 
arched over the house and down across the half 



14 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

acre of untrimmed lawn, gay here and there with 
golden glow in careless, frosty flower, three giant 
lindens guarded the stone wall by the road. And 
standing in the Doric portico of this perfect 
house, this dwelling that by its beauty of line and 
color and setting put to shame alike for dignity 
or loveliness our modern domestic architecture 
however opulent, stood a tow-headed girl of 
seven, barefooted, with frock none too clean, and 
stared at you with large-eyed, silent wonder. 

The collie that came bounding out of the house 
was not silent, however. He had the ill manners 
of the country dog, and barked about your feet 
till a sharp voice reprimanded him from the left. 
You turned to see a man with a hoe in the barn 
door. But his back was not bent down. Far 
from it ; he apologized for his dog w.ith the smil- 
ing ease of a man accustomed to be listened to. 
You spoke enthusiastically of the house and he 
looked at it himself a moment before addressing 
his reply to your companion, with a subtle flattery 
that was perhaps wholly unconscious. " Yes," 
he said, " they done a goo9 job with that house. 
A hundred and thirty-one years and the j'ists 



BARN DOORS 15 

still sound. My wife wanted some gimcracks 
and a vee-randa plastered on out front till an 
architect chap came along an' told her the house 
was better off without 'em. She wouldn't be- 
lieve me." Here he turned to you, leaning on 
his hoe, and grinned. " Funny things, women," 
he said, "ain't they?" 

The tow-headed girl had come shyly up to him, 
half hiding behind his leg as she stared at you. 
" Some day Betty here '11 want a vee-randa," he 
continued, taking her by the hand. " And if I 'm 
alive, by Gol, I s'pose she '11 git it ! " 

You and your companion laughed as the two 
of them moved toward the house. And then the 
barn-door vista caught your sight. It was a big 
barn, neat as a picture-book, and you looked be- 
tween walls of dim, golden hay, through the 
shadows, to the smaller door at the other end, 
and saw framed there in all the crystal bright- 
ness of an autumn afternoon what was most 
beautiful in your magic pasture, the waving crest 
of yellow corn, the roll of velvet slopes, a perfect 
elm springing up and, far beyond, the hill with 
its sentinel chestnut, a green watch tower stand- 



16 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ing up against the sky. In silence you gazed, and 
then each sought the other's eyes to read the 
pleasure there. You moved to the left beyond the 
barn — a cattle run intruded, then a hen-coop 
and too much corn, spoiling the composition. 
You moved to the right — the barn itself cut off 
half the view. You came back again and looked 
through the dusky walls of hay — and there was 
the picture, perfectly composed, the soul of the 
pasture caught. There followed a passage of 
learned words, psychological speculations, talk of 
Ruskin's theory about the need in a painting of 
some point that lets the vision out. She told of 
the pleasure she had all her life found in paint- 
ings that showed a window and the view through 
it, especially if that view were bright and color- 
ful and the interior dim, of her joy as a little girl 
in a drawing of the Lady of Shalott where the 
tiny reflection of the knights riding by down the 
highway " two by two " shimmered in the mirror. 
You replied with the memory of a picture in 
some book that depicted a man and a woman in 
a dim old stage-coach, while through the coach 
window a country landscape lay white under 



BARN DOORS 17 

dazzling snow, a picture that in your childhood 
had always fascinated you. You both wondered 
why no painter that you could recall had ever 
put such a barn-door vista as this on his canvas, 
this heavy, dusky frame of the humble accentu- 
ating the magic view set like a gem in its centre, 
this perfect little landscape bursting in with a 
flood of light and color between the dim walls 
of golden hay. Then turning you observed that, 
morning, noon, or twilight, as the farmer came 
from his side door or his wife stood on the soap- 
stone step, the picture met their gaze fair and 
full, was a part of the fragrance which floated 
out from the hay. 

In the silence that followed you both thought 
the same thoughts, and knew you did, for speech 
was often needless between you two. But by 
and by she put those thoughts into words, leaning 
softly against your side. " The glory and the 
beauty of the world ! " she said. " We must press 
them into a few brief weeks and take them back, 
only a memory, into that great ugly city over 
there somewhere. ,, She lifted her arm to point 
southward, and let it drop heavily again. 



18 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

" Think, think of Broadway, how it smells ; and 
the buildings and the people, and then Harlem 
and the ugly miles of sardine boxes men and 
women call homes ! " 

".Don't think of them, dear," you said. But 
there was no conviction in your tone. And some- 
how your feet were heavy as you set out down 
the highway — southward. A backward look 
showed the simple, perfect house beneath its 
guarding trees, the mouse-gray barn, the magic 
pasture rolling away into the blue distance. 
" Some day ! " you whispered. A soft hand stole 
into yours, and then thoughts too sweet for utter- 
ance walked with you down the long white road. 

Moosilauke is a noble mountain, even if it is 
absurdly easy of ascent. Its blue bulk walls in 
the southern end of the Ham Branch intervale 
with an almost grandiloquent self-sufficiency. It 
needs no spurs nor ranges to complete the job. 
Yet without trouble it fits into a barn-door vista, 
a topaz in a setting of golden hay. When you 
walk up from the wide meadows, the shaggy 
slopes of Cannon and Kinsman bearing down 



BARN DOORS 19 

upon you, the sensation of space and height on 
all your senses, and look at Moosilauke through 
the barn, it is as if your spacious landscape were 
viewed through the wrong end of a spy glass. 
The mountain has become a miniature. But it 
is a miniature clear in outline, perfect in detail, 
bursting in through the dusty gloom. 

So I was viewing it the other morning and re- 
flecting on the barn-door vistas of other days, 
when a voice roused me. " I wondered how long 
it would be," said the voice, " before you discov- 
ered it." 

" Only long enough to let you find it first," I 
answered. " Do you remember — " 

" Do I remember ? " — the voice was close to 
me now. " Why do you think I chose this 
place?" 

" But you never mentioned it." 

The voice was very close now. " Ah ! " it said, 
" if I had had to I — I — O, never let me have 
to, never, never ! " 

I think I never shall. 










v ^^^mm^^^-^' 







II 

ROADS 

NE of the pathetic features of a large city 
is the fact that so many of the streets are 
numbered. A numbered street loses caste and 
dignity as a numbered person would. Consider 
the relative effect on the imagination of " West 
Forty-ninth " and " Great Jones " Street! Fifth 
Avenue has achieved an international fame, and 
rises above its number. But compare the imagina- 
tive quality of " Fourth Avenue " and " King's 
Highway " — most mouth-filling and splendid of 
appellations! I dare say you would be disap- 
pointed if you should see King's Highway, as you 
may do on the trip to Coney Island. But its name 



ROADS 21 

gives it a dignity and a suggestion of an historic 
past which no Long Island realty company can 
quite take away from it, build they never so many 
rows of uniform frame " homes." 

No street, however, comes truly into its own 
until it shakes off the dust of town and lapses into 
a state of nature, becoming a road. Once a road, 
a name does n't so much matter. Becoming one 
with the large, simple things of the country, it 
can assert its own dignity and charm without a 
tag. In the country you do not ask the name of 
the farmer jogging along; his face is shrewd and 
kindly, and you speak to him anyway, perhaps get 
a lift for a mile or two and gossip familiarly. 
Nor do you care what the name of the road is, if 
by chance it had one back somewhere in town 
where it started. It is pleasant and companion- 
able, and ultimately will get you somewhere. Or 
if it does n't, so much the better. 

I say, so much the better ; but I am not always 
sure. Roads have an endless variety of allure- 
ment, and sometimes it is their suggestion of des- 
tination which charms, sometimes their mystery. 
Which is better depends on your individual mood. 



22 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

When I was a boy we lived on Andover Road, 
and that was an infinite satisfaction. Andover, 
with its great elms, its brooding, quiet stretches 
of shadow and old brick buildings, ivy-covered, 
the dimly comprehended thunder of its theologi- 
cal guns, best of all its school, mighty in football, 
and some day to receive me as a pupil, was a spot 
never to be too much dreamed about. In those 
days there were no trolleys nor motors, nor even 
bicycles, and Andover was a long way off up the 
broad, dusty turnpike. The tramp to the swim- 
ming-hole brought it two miles nearer, and even 
now, as I write the name, there comes back to me 
the old thrill which I always experienced when, 
by the bend at the Deacon Sanborn farm, I 
greeted the groggy signboard which lifted itself 
with difficulty out of the briers to announce : 

Andover 8 Miles. 

From that point the turnpike ran north down 
across the Hundred Acre Meadows, straight as 
an arrow. Paolo, in Stephen Phillips's play, is 
torn with a desire to " run down the white road 
to Rimini." And I, too, before I turned aside to 



ROADS 23 

the swimming-hole, used to know that desire, 
though my Francesca was a position on the foot- 
ball team. It is doubtful, however, if Paolo paid 
much attention to the road, save as a means to 
an end. I, having more time, knew every stone 
and wayside bush northward from my home. 
They were important because they were on An- 
dover Road. 

But in other moods, the charm of the unknown 
road, the invitation to explore, is the more allur- 
ing. To know where a road goes too often ac- 
companies a masterful and exclusive desire to 
get there. Not to know where a road goes and 
still to take it, means that you are in that blissful 
state of nonchalance and wonder, so characteris- 
tic of the child and so provocative of shy sur- 
prises, quiet enjoyments, intimate touch with 
nature and her beauties. A country boyhood 
filled my memory with a background of winding 
roads, of gray barns and wayside wells, of dark 
stretches under the pines where the feet crunched 
softly on brown needles and last week's rain lay 
in puddles, of crossway signboards and dusty 
raspberries. So, to me, as I explore summer 



24 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

after summer the soft New England countryside 
— on foot — there is a stir of old memory with 
every new surprise, every present beauty; and 
the unknown road calls me irresistibly, therefore. 
I now have been to Andover (and did not make 
even the second eleven ! ) . But down the next 
uncharted byway may lurk the perfect view of 
Moosilauke, or there may be that not impossible 
abandoned farm which fills the contradictory re- 
quirements of the entire family, or only a wind- 
ing ribbon of dust over a hill which will look like 
Huckleberry Hill. And just why that will give 
me so much pleasure I cannot tell you ; but it will 
bring me peace and thoughts of my grandfather, 
and the remembered fragrance of fresh milk with 
the dark berries bobbing about in it. Shall we 
have no pleasure of the road after we have been 
to Carcasonne? As life advances, the little mys- 
teries loom larger. Perhaps Shakespeare, after 
he retired to Stratford, took his greatest interest 
in his roses, and his morning walk down the gar- 
den path was his Great Adventure. 

The pleasures of the unknown road are many 
and varied. First among them, of course, is the 



ROADS 25 

pleasure of the curve. I have taken a curve in 
an automobile. Doubtless it was a very beautiful 
curve, but what I was aware of was a hoarse 
honking, a lurch, the crunch of gravel, the mutter 
of the owner about tire repairs and " these abom- 
inable country roads " ; and then the renewed 
monotony of watching a white ribbon rushing to 
meet me. That is not the way to know the pleas- 
ure of the curve. As you approach it on foot, 
you pause. You notice first, perhaps, the beauty 
of its line, a living line swept on the green canvas 
of the earth with one sure turn of a giant wrist. 
Then you notice anew the wayside foliage, 
thrown into prominence ahead because, on the 
curve, you face it. There is every shade of 
green, from blackest fir to brightest emerald. 
The hemlocks bank their layers of rich, heavy 
shadow; behind them rises a birch in virgin 
white and frail, translucent green; and behind 
that a giant chestnut thrusts up boldly against the 
blue sky. Perhaps between is a glimpse of the 
mountains, or a pasture ridge. Then you let 
your eye follow the curve of the road once more. 
It flows with its beautiful line, checkered with 



26 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

shadow, into the woods, through the Gate of the 
Cedars. And here the mystery allures once 
more. What lies beyond that curve? What 
vista awaits down the cool aisle of the ever- 
greens? How far and how well will you fare? 
So then you resume your tramping, and, if your 
stride is good and you possess imagination, as 
you swing around the curve you can get the thrill 
of it, that peculiar thrill of counteracting cen- 
trifugal force, without resort to a motor-car, and 
without the sacrifice of those delicate beauties 
and quiet allurements of the bended road. 

It is surprising, as you walk, what a tiny sym- 
phony of sounds detach themselves from the 
large hum of nature and peep or shrill or rustle 
at you along the way. There is the incessant 
snaffle of grasshoppers around your feet when 
you brush close to the margin; the shrill of 
crickets, at night a sleepy, peaceful, antiphonal 
chorus; the soft scurry of little things in the 
hedges ; the rustle of a snake into the dead leaves 
by the edge of the swamp; the rattle of a stick 
kicked down by a chipmunk as he scampers along 
the stone wall, scolding ; the extraordinarily high 



ROADS 2,j 

Phee, phee, phee of the Pickering frogs in the 
wayside pools in April ; the tap of a woodpecker ; 
the call of a chickadee, most friendly of birds, 
waiting in the hickories to greet the passer. And 
always from June to August along unfrequented 
ways in the north, especially in Franconia, there 
lurks the possibility of a hermit thrush. 

Once Stella and I climbed Mt. Agamenticus, 
and as we tumbled down the trail through the 
woods Stella pealed out the Valkyries' call, Ho- 
jo-to-ho-o ! — the augmented fifth ringing clear 
and wild in the stillness of the uplands. Just as 
we reached the road and she paused for breath, 
there came an answer from the thicket, sweet and 
true and without a hint of the Valkyries' wild- 
ness, yet just now curiously defiant. We laughed, 
and Stella pealed again. Once more the thrush 
answered, with his fresh and exquisitely con- 
trolled voice. Where have I heard his song 
likened to an accordion going by in the air ? This 
song was not like that. This thrush went up the 
octave scattering triplets with the measured pre- 
cision of formal melody written for wood-wind, 
yet with supreme joy of the grace and sponta- 



28 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

neity of the performance — Mozart defying 
Wagner. 

" I give up! " cried Stella, and we left the bird 
triumphant in his thicket. 

The unknown road, as it winds along, is a per- 
petual garden, wild roses, lambkill, Joe-Pye-weed, 
wild raspberry, asters, goldenrod, filling the sum- 
mer through, not to mention the berries which 
you eat as well as look at; and now and again 
in some melancholy cellar hole at the base of 
a charred brick chimney, the flaming fireweed 
which blooms in the path of desolation. Indeed, 
a catalogue of roadside flowers, even in New 
England alone, would fill pages. Do you know 
toad-flax and golden ragweed (not the kind that 
gives hay-fever!)? And gold-thread, quaintest 
of little growing things, and lion's-f oot, and wild 
lettuce? And of climbing things along the way 
there is always clematis and hempweed, and often 
bedstraw, that, overcome with the humbleness 
of its name perhaps, leans heavily upon other 
stalks, bearing its white, sticky, faintly fragrant 
masses of bloom. But best of all are the re3 
bunch-berries where the pines are near, and the 



ROADS 29 

fringed gentians on the uplands, bits of sky come 
down to earth. Who needs a garden when he can 
tramp the roads? 

And the line of the road, too, is a perpetual 
revelation of beauty. From a high hilltop it 
dips with the grace of the curve at the crest of 
a waterfall, into the woods, and is lost to view. 
It seems to flow away from under your feet. 
You look out over the trees to a valley, checkered 
with green pastures and brown squares of 
ploughed land, with here and there a white house, 
and suddenly a mile away you spy your road 
again, emerging from the woods and beckoning 
you up over the next slope. Down in the valley 
it takes on another aspect. It is the line that 
carries the eye out of the picture. Shut in by 
the hills, there would be something a little oppres- 
sive about this quiet green bowl but for the 
friendly road. That climbs steadily over the 
slope, laying down its white ribbon between the 
pastures, and, letting out the eye, lets out the 
imagination, tells of things beyond. So long as 
its graceful line breaks over the crest, you are 
content to abide here for a spell, to eat your lunch 



SO BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and chat with the small boy who comes out of the 
big red barn. 

He is not a Will-o'-the-mill. Armies have not 
marched past on that road, tanned about the eyes, 
nor great coaches gone rumbling down to a far 
city on the plain. It is nothing but the Athol 
road, and he has been to Athol — knows where 
you can get fishm' tackle there. — What ? Bless 
the boy, he 's been to Boston, too ! An' seen the 
State House, an' the Bunker Hill Monument, an' 
the Common, an' the Harvards play baseball! 
Nowadays, alas, all roads lead to Carcasonne, 
and there are no illusions any more ! 

No illusions? Not caring for Athol, we hope- 
fully take this other road to the left, through the 
woods, and presently it bends by a row of elms 
and maples, giant trees which show, between, a 
smooth-cut meadow and opposite a man laying 
brown ribbons with a plough under a cloud-dome. 
Then it leads us past a square, substantial farm- 
house, past another and yet another, and sud- 
denly grows narrow, while the tell-tale grass 
appears between the wheel-ruts. But still we 
hopefully keep on, up the hill, till without warn- 



ROADS 31 

ing the road runs casually into the front door of 
a farmhouse and disappears. We go round the 
house and look for it again, but it is not there; 
nothing there but chickens, raspberries, and dish- 
water. 

" What have you done with the road ? " we de- 
mand of the boy who comes peering from the 
wood-shed. 

For a moment he hesitates. Then a grin 
breaks over his face. " Paw used it fer beddin' 
las' winter," he drawls, " it 's so soft." 

We are wise and cease the contest. " Is there 
no way on ? " we ask, humbly. 

" 'Pends on whar you want ter git." 

" Anywhere — the next town." 

" Hain't no next town. You kin hit a loggin' 
trail down ter the Great Swamp, an' then you kin 
strike over ter the railroad, ef you don' mind 
gittin' wet." 

So we go back, but without anger at the Run- 
away Road. One is never angry at a road. If 
one takes the wrong road when he really wants 
to reach a definite place, it is his fault for not 
asking the way or carrying a map. Going back, 



32 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the roadside vistas are different, seen from the 
reverse; even the coloring in the foliage, the 
shadows on the fields, take on a different aspect. 
But the way seems shorter. Landmarks are fa- 
miliar, and the eye jumps ahead from one to the 
other with certainty of the distance. Then, too, 
the sense of curiosity, the tense mood of expecta- 
tion, is at rest. So, if the legs are not weary, the 
ten miles home are always less than the ten miles 
out. Besides, you have made friends with the 
road, and the walk with a friend is always shorter. 
I admit that I greet a new road with almost as 
much pleasure as a new person, and usually part 
from it with rather more regret. 

The friendly road! Two pictures come back 
to me, one out of childhood, one out of yesterday. 
It was night, the deep, starlit, hushed night of 
the mountain intervales. And I, a little boy, stole 
away from the buzz of talk on the veranda and 
scurried up the road, so familiar by day, so sandy, 
but now curiously smooth and hard under my 
feet. (Later in life I used to notice that a road 
the bicycler cursed by day, picking his path, 
seemed smooth enough as he bowled along in the 



ROADS 33 

dark; which thing is a parable.) The black wall 
of mountains to the left grew terribly like a great 
wave as I ran along — a great wave that seemed 
to be rushing upon me. But I climbed up the hill, 
comforting myself with a bravado whistle. At 
the top of the hill the road swept past sentinel 
cedars like black spires pointing to the stars, and 
ran into the woods, so that it soon showed but a 
ghostly white patch ahead of me. I slowed down 
to a timid walk, my nerves a-quiver. Suddenly 
there was a terrific noise in the darkness side of 
me. I turned and ran. It was only the stamping 
of horses in a stable — that I realized the next 
day; indeed, I almost knew it then — with my 
head. But my head was not in control. I ran 
in foolish, unreasoned terror. I remember how 
that white, ghostly patch of road gleamed ever 
ahead of me, with friendly help and comfort. At 
the sentinel cedars I again saw the ridge of the 
mountains. The moon was just coming up be- 
hind them, and the firs on their summits were 
shot with silver, like the foam on a wave-crest. 
The illusion of a great breaker curling over upon 
our valley was overpowering. For an instant I 



34 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

stood paralyzed with terror, conquered by my 
own imagination. Then I saw my friendly white 
road stretching down to the distant lights of the 
house. And, with a little cry, I raced madly 
down it, back to the buzz of talk. The next day 
the road looked as commonplace as before, but 
ever after it has held a warm spot in my affec- 
tions, like a human thing. 

The picture of yesterday is framed by the 
branches of an apple-tree. There came first a 
complaint about skirts, wherein our apple-tree 
differed from the first and most famous! But 
once up in the spreading boughs, we gave our- 
selves over to lazy, happy contemplation of the 
view, while the afternoons drifted by. 

The apple-tree stood in a pasture. East was 
a stone wall, half hidden in goldenrod and wild- 
rose bushes. Then the white road swept curving 
across the picture, from behind a little grove to 
the right, back behind a little hill to the left. Be- 
yond the road the coast ledges rolled away, cov- 
ered with bay and huckleberry bushes and scrub 
pines, till they broke against the sky. Only, in 
the centre, there was a depression filled in by the 



ROADS 35 

blue sea, its horizon line laid down with a ruler. 
Always a speck of white sail moved across that 
patch of blue, and always at sunset time the sail 
took fire. Meanwhile traffic flowed around the 
white ribbon by the wall — automobiles with gut- 
tural honks, buckboards freighted with boarders, 
pedestrians, Indians with packs of sweet-grass 
baskets, and finally, as the sail was taking fire, 
always an old man driving two black cows. All 
this we saw from our apple-tree, while the salt 
air blew sweetly about us. And when the old 
man had driven his cows around the hill, we 
stepped into the white road and it led us cheer- 
fully home to supper. How simple it sounds to 
tell! Yet that road touched our picture as with 
a gentle hand, a hand which held the green and 
blue beauties of the landscape closely to our hu- 
man kin — and led us home to supper. We loved 
it like a friend. 

It is curious, indeed, how closely roads are 
linked with humanity, how warmly companion- 
able they are, and yet how little they ever mar 
the beauty, even the wildness, of a picture. That, 
I suppose, is because they are made of the earth 



36 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and follow its contours, catch the rhythm and 
flow of nature. A snow-covered road in winter 
lies through the bare trees, lovely with the blue 
shadows of their trunks, and throws into exqui- 
site relief the straight, slender horizontals of the 
second-growth saplings, the columnar aisles of 
the hemlocks. Catch the road in the early morn- 
ing after a new fall of snow, when the sun is 
bright above a dazzling world and the chickadees 
sing, and you will find, perhaps, the tracks of a 
single " pung," blue as the shadows of the tree- 
trunks. These blue tracks say to you that some 
fellow has been along ahead, up before you were 
into the white, frosty world, with the jingle of 
sleigh-bells. He has left all this beauty of slen- 
der horizontals, of columnar hemlocks, of blue 
shadows on the white carpet, but he has left, too, 
thanks to the road, a blue trail which jogs you 
pleasantly to remember your human kin, which 
keeps nature linked with Man. After all, he is 
rather a morose and stingy lover of nature who 
would have it otherwise, who would banish roads 
from his landscape. 

It was a theory in the old days that a good 



ROADS 37 

road, like a straight line, was the shortest dis- 
tance between two points. So the Old Ports- 
mouth Road goes up Sewall's Hill from York 
Harbor, and the former road from Rowe to 
Charlemont in the northern Berkshires is now but 
a logging-trail over Mount Adams, where the 
fringed gentians bloom in the wheel-ruts. Newer 
roads follow " the lay of the land," and if you 
want to tramp in comfort, get a government sur- 
vey map, find the roads that go straightest over 
the highest elevations, and take them. That Old 
Portsmouth Road knows not the dust of touring- 
cars, but it leads you past the house of a certain 
wise man who has built himself one of the most 
beautiful dwellings and one of the most adorable 
gardens along the coast of Maine, and built them 
for their own sakes, since none pass to see. The 
garden gate is a gap in the stone wall under an 
apple-tree, and the path lets in to a pool under a 
boulder, a tangle of ferns, and then the blaze of 
hollyhocks, cosmos, gladioli, and other old-fash- 
ioned blooms. The house is deep-brown stucco 
with an Italian roof. Trumpet-vines climb over 
it, and two deep orange awnings shade the door 



38 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and the ample window of the living-room. Set 
on a hill, you see over the tree-tops to the new 
road, the river, and the far-off point where the 
cottages face the sea, back yard touching back 
yard, huddled without privacy together. Then 
the Old Portsmouth Road runs down the hill 
again and you meet the cows coming home at 
twilight. It is good to find a man who dares place 
a lovely and expensive dwelling on the back road. 
It shows him not dependent on the opinions of 
his fellows. I have had the temerity to fancy 
that he even leaves his machine in the garage 
occasionally, and walks somewhere. 

It would be foolish to dwell here on the socio- 
logical value of good roads, their place in the 
well-being and progress of mankind. Others 
more fitted have told of that. But has a paper 
ever been written on roads in literature? Cer- 
tainly the word " road " would fill pages in a con- 
cordance of popular quotations. From the strait 
and narrow road of hortatory scripture to that 
which climbs in Christina Rossetti's " Up Hill," 
roads run through what the Race has written, 
almost always with allegorical purpose, a symbol 



ROADS 39 

of the eternal restlessness of man, the flow and 
flight of human aspiration, the steady plod of 
time. Simple, primitive, unmistakable, roads are 
among the enduring things, and so wind their way 
through enduring literature, one of the ultimate 
metaphors. How full of roads is Bunyan's book ! 
And how full of roads, in these latter days, are 
the novels and poems of Thomas Hardy. In the 
open Wessex country they are apparent from 
afar, and in the novels you never lose sight of 
them, till they become charged with significance. 
To think of Jude is to see his hungry little 
figure by the sign-post, looking down the long 
road to Oxford. Egdon Heath carries the bricky 
outfit of the Reddleman moving along a white 
trail cut sharp on the furze. And plodding fig- 
ures in " Tess " pass and repass on endless high- 
ways, weary with you know not what tragedy. 
In the poems the poet's own quaint illustrations 
show his preoccupation with roads. Ever they 
are vanishing over hills, reappearing in distant 
valleys, ribboning the pastures. He would call 
them, no doubt, the trail of Man over the face of 
the earth. Perhaps, then, our joy of the trail 



40 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

depends on our fondness for him who made it, 
and the road is beautiful, lead it to Carcasonne 
or Athol, Mass., in proportion as we are willing 
to share it, are glad that others have blazed it on 
ahead, and will follow after. 

But does that philosophy compel us trampers 
to breathe with delight the dust of the passing 
motor-cars ? By what new pragmatism shall we 
adopt them into the pleasant scheme of things? 
And it is a short road now which has no motor- 
car. Like most philosophers, I shall have to end 
with a riddle ! 





Ill 

RIVERS 
F you desire an argument for idealism, said 
Emerson, stoop down and look at a famil- 
iar landscape through your legs. (This, it will be 
recalled, was also Peter Pan's method for intimi- 
dating the wolves!) Yet Emerson need hardly 
have resorted to so gymnastic a feat for casting 
over a familiar landscape the sense of strange- 
ness. There flows through the Concord mead- 
ows, and 'neath " the rude bridge " which spans 
its flood, the Concord River, incomparable for 
canoes, and from the seat of a gently moving 
craft on its dark, quiet waters you may see all 
that fair New England countryside through the 



42 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

transforming lens of an unaccustomed view- 
point — the viewpoint, as it were, of the floor 
of the world. 

If you walk with the shade of old Izaak Wal- 
ton by the bank of a river, in quiet contemplation 
or busy with a rod, you may fall in love with life 
and flowing streams, but you will not know the 
true river view. You will know that only from 
a boat, preferably a noiseless, smooth-slipping 
canoe, because only from the boat is your level 
of vision altered from the habitual, lowered till 
all the common objects of the landscape shift 
their values and the world is indeed so strange a 
place that you realize, as Emerson intended, how 
many of our so-called facts are merely habits of 
the human eye. We have often suspected that 
Bishop Berkeley himself was a traveller by in- 
land waterways, and drew his philosophy from 
the river view. 

Did you ever lie stretched on your garden path, 
shutting the eye farther from the ground and 
squinting with the other through the strange 
jungle of your flower-beds? The sensation is 
curious, almost disconcerting. The pebbles on 



RIVERS 43 

the path cast long shadows, the bordering grasses 
are tall, and the stalks of your daffodils tower like 
a pine wood, while the sun shines through amid 
the translucent green trunks, bringing down a 
shimmer of golden blooms. See, a robin hops 
into the picture! You know him for a robin by 
his rosy breast and his brittle legs. But how 
huge he is ! You are scarce aware of the sky, 
and of your neighbors' houses, even of so much 
of your own garden as lies beyond this little field 
of your earth-bound vision, you are not aware 
at all. You feel curiously like Gulliver in Brob- 
dingnag. As you rise to your feet, you are 
tempted to rub your eyes, like one awakening 
from a dream. 

This, on a larger scale and enhanced by the 
charm of moving boat and lapping water, is the 
sensation of him who journeys by a little water- 
way through the meadows and the hills. A well- 
behaved river is bound to be lower than its banks, 
so that sometimes your head, as you sit in your 
canoe, is actually below the floor of the world, 
sometimes on its level, but seldom or never above 
it. What a transformation this works on the 



44 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

landscape ! Step into your craft, dip your paddle, 
glide out on the current, and the flowers and 
grasses on the bank, scarce noted before, are sud- 
denly the rich foreground of your picture. They 
are larger, more intricate, more beautiful, than 
you ever guessed. The cardinal flowers and 
Joe-Pye-weed lift their blooms against the blue 
sky, instead of lying at your feet. The delicate 
designs of their petals emerge like a snow-flake 
on velvet. As you glide under arching willows 
or maples, you seem to be in the depth of a forest. 
The road or the trolley line may be but a few 
hundred yards away, yet you do not see them. 
You float silently up a liquid aisle beneath 
vaulted foliage, in a sufficient and cloistered 
world of your own. 

It may be presently you catch the sparkle of 
bright sunlight on the water ahead, and emerg- 
ing from the mottled shadows of the woods your 
canoe slips into a stretch of river where tall 
grasses come down to the black, oozy banks. An 
old punt, half full of yellow water, is moored to 
a stake. Out in the fields you hear the hot click, 
click of a mowing machine, drowsier than a 



RIVERS 45 

locust's song at summer noon. Men are near, no 
doubt horses, a road, perhaps a town. But you 
do not see them. You see only the old punt, the 
tall grasses on the bank, it may be the top of a 
far blue hill peeping over, and ahead the quiet 
waterway wandering again into the cool shadows 
of the maples. Those hayfields might stretch 
to infinity for all you can say. Your view of the 
world is not comprehensive ; it is the view of the 
worm rather than the bird. But how alluring is 
its strangeness, how restful its seclusion, between 
grassy banks under the dome of the summer sky ! 
Even the ways of the worm may be pleasant, 
then — a fact worth finding out. 

Presently there is a rustle in the grasses, and a 
small boy stands over you, staring down, a one- 
piece bamboo fishpole towering in his hand. His 
body cuts against the sun, and, see, he has an 
aura in his hair ! 

Always there is this strangeness of the river 
way to give it perpetual allure. Do you meet 
with a fisherman sitting on the bank, it is his feet 
you see first. Always the bordering grasses are 
important, and how large the sky, how flat and 



46 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

restricted the plain when the banks sink down to 
give a glimpse of it ! Passing under a bridge, the 
dust disturbed by a rumbling motor overhead 
shakes down upon you or tinkles on the water — 
sweetest of tiny sounds, this tinkle of dust on 
still water! It is as if you were in another 
world, below your human kind in space, but 
not, you are sure, in degree, so gently your 
craft slips along amid the cloistered beauties of 
the stream. 

" In the garden/' writes Emerson in his " Jour- 
nal," " the eye watches the flying cloud and Wal- 
den Woods, but turns from the village. Poor 
Society! what hast thou done to be the aversion 
of us all ? " But need Society be our aversion 
because sometimes we turn from it in weariness 
to the contemplation of Walden Woods or the 
river way, or because our spirit recognizes in 
itself a primal kinship not alone with Society 
but with Solitude as well, with whispering waters 
and Joe-Pye-weed and the tall grass that nods 
against the sky ? 

" What do they know of England who only England 
know?" 



RIVERS 47 

And what do we know of Society who know 
nothing of Solitude ? He sees not the battle best 
who is in the brunt of it. He is not the master of 
his social relations whose every idea and action is 
born of human intercourse, because he is not the 
master of his own soul; he has ignored its rela- 
tions to the primal and inanimate, its capacity 
for contemplation. " All great deeds/' said Mar- 
tineau, " are born of solitude." It is in solitude 
that the thought matures. It is in the face of his 
origins that what is trivial in man is disclosed 
to his questioning spirit. Let him go and con- 
template rivers, and be ashamed of the size of 
last Sunday's newspapers ! 

For ever a river " addresses the imagination 
and the interrogating soul." The population of 
cities is a dull study to the boy, but the length 
of the Nile is poetry. Geography is a less inter- 
esting study to the child of to-day than it was to 
our fathers just in so far as the map of Africa 
has lost those delightful pink portions marked 
" unexplored," and the upper reaches of its rivers 
lost their dotted lines which indicated the Un- 
known. The boy is not greatly impressed by the 



48 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

size of the wheat crop of the United States, but 
what boy would not defend the size of the Missis- 
sippi against the world? A river comes from the 
Unknown, from the high hills and the forest, and 
it moves as irresistibly as a planet to the Un- 
known again, to the sea. It speaks forever the 
mystery of its origin and of its destination. Like 
a road, it calls perpetually to the imagination 
because it is going somewhere. But, unlike a 
road, there is no hint of man in its composition. 
It is the leader always. Man follows panting on 
its bank, and lays his roads where the river has 
been the primal engineer. 

We are all familiar with the river's calm and 
assured position in the centre of the picture. 
Whether it is the Rhine coming down through 
vine-terraced hills, or the magnificent Hudson 
sweeping out of the blue north into the view of 
those tenement-towered heights of upper Man- 
hattan, or the Housatonic curling through the 
meadows of Stockbridge ringed by purple hills, 
or the sluggish Charles gay with canoes amid the 
lawns of Dedham, or the Wild Ammonoosuc 
chattering out from the forests of Moosilauke 



RIVERS 49 

and fighting its way through rugged intervales 
to reach the Connecticut, the view is always 
composed around the river — and no matter how 
high you climb to contemplate, widening your 
horizon, ever does that silver thread of water 
bind the landscape into a perfect whole. 

So it is that man's roads winding by its banks, 
or his glittering steel rails following its curves, 
seem but to trail the primitive pioneer — as, in- 
deed, is the fact — and where the river, with 
magnificent sweep and power, ploughs its way 
through the hills the glittering rails plunge after, 
with a kind of joy of exploration, as if they cried : 
" We shall follow it and see what comes ! " 
Small wonder the river dominates the imagina- 
tion, and to the boy is the most delectable thing 
in geography. Even that brook behind his house 
somewhere joins the sea. He may launch a chip 
on its surface for a voyage of a thousand miles. 
What is the population of Algeria before such a 
living marvel as this ? 

When I was a boy our baseball field was on 
the summit of an almost imperceptible divide. 
A spring at the southern end sent a diminutive 



So BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

trickle down through a meadow where white vio- 
lets grew, into the discolored waters of the 
" town brook," and thence ultimately into the 
Saugus River. A second spring at the northern 
end sent a diminutive trickle through the muddy 
ooze of Duck Pond into the cranberry bog of 
Birch Meadow, and thence through three miles 
of white pine forest — now, alas! no more — 
into the long, forest-bordered reaches of the 
Hundred Acre meadows, where the Ipswich 
River wound its sinuous way, with sluggish bot- 
toms where the hornpout bit and gravel pools 
where we swam. I can remember as it were yes- 
terday the day when I studied in my geography 
about a divide, and realized with a thrill of joy 
that Kingman's field was such a thing. I raced 
home from school. I ran first to the southern 
spring, then to the northern, and told myself that 
each was the headwater of a river! It was my 
hour to stand " silent upon a peak in Darien." 
My childish imagination followed those trickles 
in the grass till my body was borne in a great 
boat on their mighty waters and my ears heard 
the sound of the sea. Geography for me had sud- 



RIVERS Si 

denly become alive, tingling — had suddenly be- 
come poetry. I waited with burning impatience 
for Saturday, to follow my northward running 
brook, muddy and torn and scratched, through 
the bogs and the pine woods, till it joined the Ip- 
swich. And then I stood on a tuft of grass in 
the swampy bottom where the two streams met 
and yearned for a craft to carry me down the 
larger body past grandfather's mill, past un- 
known towns, till the water tasted of the salt and 
the breakers boomed. 

Since that far-off day, I have stood by a spring 
bubbling from under a boulder, and watched the 
thread of crystal water slip through the mosses 
into the depths of a mountain ravine, while tall 
peaks towered about me — slip away on its jour- 
ney of a thousand miles to the sea. I have been 
at the high head of a river monarch. But I was 
less thrilled than the day when I first conceived 
that Kingman's field was a divide. Since that 
day, too, I have launched a boat on many rivers, 
but never with quite the expectant joy which at- 
tended the launching of the Crusader, for that 
long-dreamed-of trip down the Ipswich. 



52 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

The Crusader was made at home (for every 
home in those days was a manual training 
school), with ribs of ash and a covering of can- 
vas, painted vivid red. Carefully parting my 
hair in the. middle, at my grandfather's solemn 
advice, I launched forth below the mill pond for 
my far voyaging, I and another boy in a rakish 
canoe, also home-made, called the Stampede. 
The boys in the swimming hole came racing out 
like dolphins about our prows, but we beat them 
off with paddles, and sailed away into a land of 
wonder. How each river bend ahead lured us on 
— bends where the willows arched over the 
water, or a birch dropped a white reflection into 
the black depths, or the current seemed to widen, 
grow more sluggish, promising perhaps a mill 
pond, the excitement of a " carry/' the thrill of 
a strange village! No mystery is quite like the 
mystery of a river bend, as no curve is quite so 
beautiful. When you are a boy on your first 
river voyage you do not pray for an arrow-like 
course, you welcome each curve and double as a 
fresh revelation of romance. When the river 
bend has lost its charm, then you may know you 



RIVERS S3 

are middle-aged, indeed, and fit only for auto- 
mobiles and a luxurious hotel at night. 

What memories come back to him who has 
travelled by river ways, of camps regretfully left 
behind or human scenes which he has floated 
past, ethereal as a dream! There is always a 
wistful moment of parting from a pleasant camp, 
on tiny island or wooded bank. You rise before 
the sun is free of the valley fog, plunge in the 
cold water, catch a fish, perhaps, build up the fire 
in last night's embers, and while the coffee boils 
you look down the river way which beckons, cool 
and strange in the light before the day. The 
great trees on the bank behind you rise ethereal, 
phantom shadows against the ochre dawn. The 
fire snaps yellow and warm. Ahead the stream 
winds into the mystery of the morning. You eat 
your breakfast, strike your tent, load the canoes, 
douse the embers, which sizzle pathetically, and 
with a backwarH glance of gratitude at your inn 
beneath the stars you slip down the current for 
a new day's adventures. No officious landlord 
comes out to the curb to say good-by. No bell- 
hop is seen running to you with a morning paper 



54 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and an eye hungry for tips. What the world is 
doing you neither know nor care. The morning 
mists are rising from the water. The stream lies 
clear ahead. The sun is golden on the distant 
hills. And your paddle digs the water till the 
little boat leaps with the joy of health and 
freedom. 

Or it may be that twilight steals upon you while 
you are still paddling in search of a camping 
place free of the haunts of men, of towns and 
befouling mills. In the gathering darkness you 
see lights on the water ahead, hear the sounds of 
music and voices. Presently you have glided into 
fairyland. Lawns come down to the water, gay 
with Japanese lanterns. The landings are decked 
with color. Canoes are floating in procession, 
like bright water flies, with lamps at prow and 
stern. As your dark and travel-soiled craft 
shoots into the radius of these lights, the faces of 
girls flash at you, you hear the tinkle of their 
laughter, you move through the fairy scene and 
pageantry as through a dream, thrilling strangely 
to its human joy, yet strangely not a part of it, 
passing on to your lonely camp in the woods be- 




Ahead the stream winds into the mystery of the morning. See page 53 



RIVERS 55 

low. Such scenes remain in the memory when 
much else that seemed more important to our 
lives has faded and vanished, and they come back 
to us out of the past with a wistful sweetness, 
ever more beautiful with the years. 

The " ingenious Spaniard," quoted by Izaak 
Walton says that, " rivers and the inhabitants of 
the watery element were made for wise men to 
contemplate, and fools to pass by without consid- 
eration." But we ourselves are not entirely con- 
vinced that the man who contemplates too habit- 
ually the inhabitants, truly contemplates the 
rivers. We have come upon the feet of many an 
angler, dangling over the bank, and lifted our 
eyes to a face whereon was writ less calm contem- 
plation than annoyance at our disturbance of the 
water, or a sportsman's patient, stolid eagerness 
for game. We are far from persuaded that the 
average fisherman is a contemplative man at all, 
though it be heresy to harbor the doubt. Some 
of them are. So are many men who never fish. 
But, after all, to do anything well requires con- 
centration on your task, and we venture to affirm 
that nobody can cast a fly successfully in an alder 



56 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

thicket or under low-spreading maples or hem- 
locks whose mind is filled with philosophic re- 
flections upon the destination of the stream or 
the beauty of the banks. Neither, we venture to 
affirm, is the patient watching of a cork on the 
water consistent with that breadth of vision, free- 
dom of fancy and sensory alertness demanded by 
true contemplation. Contemplation of an inhab- 
itant of the watery element means to the average 
angler one thing — what is the best way to haul 
him out? Contemplation of the river — which 
is the best pool for fish ? No, the wise man who 
would truly contemplate rivers walks by their 
banks, if they will not float a canoe, or launches 
his craft upon them if they be deep enough, nor 
does he feel that he knows them until he has seen 
the world from their angle, from this curious 
viewpoint below the brink, and until he has fol- 
lowed them up into the hills whence they come 
and down toward the sea whither they go. You 
do not know a river till you have become one with 
its current, a part of its life, winding with it 
through the meadows and fighting with it through 
the barriers of rock. 



RIVERS 57 

It is a curious fact which all sensitive observers 
must have noted that you get almost no " feel " 
of the contours of a country from the tonneau 
of an automobile. The sag of the springs, the 
extreme speed, the ease of the spurt up a hill, the 
rolling away of the landscape, the rush of the 
road to meet you, all combine to destroy that 
sense of local difference between one valley and 
the next. Of the delicate pleasures of roadside 
flowers and lovely vistas down logging roads and 
bird calls and wayfarers' greetings, of course 
you get nothing at all. That is why some of us, 
to the extreme perplexity of the rest of us, take 
to our feet on the back roads. 

But even more intimately than from the wind- 
ing highway, travelled afoot, the country dis- 
closes its subtler aspects to him who journeys 
down its rivers by canoe. A road goes arbitra- 
rily, often, where man has willed. A river finds 
by the first law of its nature the bottom land, it 
draws in to itself ultimately all roads and ways 
of man, and from its surface one looks perpetu- 
ally up, instead of now up, now down, getting a 
constant, unchanging perspective on everything 



58 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

within the field of vision, which cannot err or 
falsify. Whose house is set the higher on a hill ? 
From the river you shall have no doubt. Those 
blue huddled hills and intersecting valleys resolve 
themselves out of confusion into the assured fa- 
miliarity of a map, to the river voyager. He has, 
on the very scale of nature itself, one of those 
raised maps so dear to the heart of boyhood, and 
he is sailing through the heart of it. Perpetually 
ahead lies the beckoning bend or the long vista 
of river-valley opening between the hills. Per- 
petually to right and left are timbered slopes or 
grassy uplands, now and again parting to pro- 
claim a tributary, threaded with roads that seem 
ever to be coming down to speak to you in your 
canoe, to bring you news of the countryside. 
When you pass through a town, it is through 
the intimate life of the back yar3s, not 
down its formal main street; you view it in 
its shirt-sleeves, as it were, you catch it ofif its 
guard, its houses faced the other way, their 
back roofs peeping at you over the trees, while 
paths come down as if to watch you pass. 
Once more, the river view has the charm of 



RIVERS 59 

strangeness, reveals the world to you from a 
different angle. 

" Poor Society ! What hast thou done to be the 
aversion of us all? " This thou hast done. Thou 
has cast us and kept us in moulds of convention, 
in starched collars and paved streets and stuffy 
house (or, more often, in flats!); in habits of 
vision and of speech ; thou hast compelled us too 
often to forget our own souls in the bicker of 
market-place or assembly. This thou hast done 
because it is a law of our nature to herd with our 
kind, to fight for things material, to create art 
and sky-scrapers and fine clothes and grand opera 
and high tariffs and slums and creeds and all 
sorts of jumbled wisdom and folly. But it is a 
law of our nature, too, sometimes to revolt, to 
throw ourselves back on the bosom of the Inani- 
mate, to cry out not for art but the huddle of hills 
into the sunset and the song of a thrush, not for 
sky-scrapers but the ranks of the towering pines, 
not for paved streets and trolley cars, but the soft 
seduction of a little river. 

A pipe, a box of matches, a hatchet, a little tent, 
a rod and line, blankets, a coffee-pot and frying 



60 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

pan, a jug of water, a box of food, an old shirt, 
a canoe and the right companion to handle the 
bow-paddle, and in the ethereal river mists of a 
summer morning you launch your craft where 
the stream breaks out of its mountain cradle, and 
without need of map or compass give yourself 
gladly to its care until, perhaps, it joins the sea. 
It is a new world you shall see, through the magic 
lens of your lowered perspective, a world wherein 
many humble things are important and many 
great things shrink to insignificance. You shall 
pass through the haunts of men and care not for 
them. You shall camp in the fragrance of hem- 
locks and scatter the embers of your fire with 
regret. You shall make for the bend ahead with 
the joy of a discoverer, for the bend where the 
black water steals mysteriously into the green, 
sun-flecked aisles of the forest, and your talk is 
hushed, your paddle muffled, till you creep in as 
silently as the moccasined Indian on the trail, as 
noiselessly as the water itself, or for the bend 
where the river, larger now, sweeps round a 
promontory covered with maples, all their sha3- 
owed symmetry backed by the blue sky, into the 



RIVERS 61 

promise of sun-filled meadows and the languor 
of a summer day. Hour by hour the glide of the 
boat shall lull you, and when at twilight you 
climb stiff-legged out and rising upon the bank 
see the sky suddenly shrink, the world grow 
larger and familiar again, the grassy banks be- 
come once more not a bounding wall but a small 
thing at your feet, the water shall still whisper 
a lullaby, running past you all the night. 

And presently you shall go back to your Society 
— since there, after all, is probably your ultimate 
place — with a new light, if ever so feeble, on 
what is important in it and what trivial, and the 
wistful memory of your nights beneath the stars 
and your days on the bosom of the kindly stream. 
Such is the true contemplation of rivers. It has 
little to do with angling, after all. It is born of 
the impulse of solitude and the instinct in man 
to wander from the hills to the sea, on the track 
of those primal forces which are greater than he, 
which grant him a new glimpse of beauty or 
awake an old romance, which stir in his imagina- 
tion the vast and steadying images of his origin. 





IV 

THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 
HE little boy kneeling on the seat of a car 

and looking out of the window, while the 
soles of his boots point at the other passengers or 
muddy the gown of the woman next to him, is a 
symbol of that curiosity which has conquered the 
universe for Man, and of that mysterious pictorial 
sense which has discovered the universe to be 
beautiful. Because a window frames a view, be- 
cause it isolates some section of the landscape, 
inviting detailed attention, windows serve quite 
as much to let the eye and the fancy out as to 
let the air and sunshine in. When the window 
is a car window it isolates each moment a differ- 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 63 

ent bit of the pleasant world, it frames a con- 
stantly changing panorama of scenery. The 
landscape flows past with ever new surprises. 
Whether for the little boy excited by the adven- 
ture of travel and the wonders of fresh towns 
and countryside, or for the man whose interest 
in " this goodly frame, the earth " has not been 
dulled nor his primitive curiosity satiated, a rail- 
road journey is a trip through nature's picture- 
gallery, square after square of landscape flowing 
past, stark drawings in the realistic style where 
factories huddle and chimneys flare, alternating 
with the sun-swept distances of a Turner or the 
domestic hillsides, crowned with azure sky, of an 
Alden Weir. 

I shall never forget my first glimpse of the 
South. It was through a car window, in cotton 
time. School books and " Dixie " had filled my 
boyish imagination with the thought of cotton 
growing, of darkies singing as they picked, of 
the romance and charm of plantation scenes. It 
was dark when we left Washington, and I was 
put to bed at. Fredericksburg, with the picture 
of two long, lank men in slouch hats, men differ- 



64 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ent from any my Northern experience knew, 
standing on the platform in the light of a smoky 
lamp, as my last recollection before slumber came, 
a preliminary excitation. When I woke up it was 
broad day. I pulled up the shade and looked out. 
Cotton ! 

We were rolling through great fields of cotton, 
bursting open on its low bushes like snow blown 
over the red soil. Negroes in gay handkerchiefs 
were moving between the rows, picking. Beyond 
the fields were ranks of Southern pines. The 
picture changed suddenly. The pines were closer. 
In among them stood the gray, weathered cabins 
of the negroes, thin smoke ascending from each 
straight up in the still air, faintly blue against 
the long needles of the pines; then more fields 
of cotton, stretching away. I was indescribably 
thrilled. It was as if I had gone to sleep in 
my native North, and suddenly waked up into 
a picture-book world, long dreamed of and 
desired. To this day I go South by the night 
train in cotton time, to wake up for that picture, 
and always I greet it with a thrill — the blown 
snow on the red fields, the negroes picking, the 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 65 

pines and the cabin smoke, framed by the car 
window. 

One of the joys of a train journey is the oppor- 
tunity it affords to pass from one season to an- 
other, almost from one world to another, in the 
space even of a few hours. It is sometimes diffi- 
cult to view New England from a car window, 
because of the New England car windows. But 
even there the railroads are becoming radical, 
more generous with soap and water. Not long 
ago I left New York in what the calendar pro- 
claimed was a winter day. There was no other 
authority. A warm, sticky rain was falling on 
warm, sticky pavements. There was no sign of 
snow. One perspired in an overcoat. For a time 
I looked at the advertising signs along the track, 
which obviated the necessity of buying a maga- 
zine. Between theatrical posters, corset procla- 
mations and the allurement of suspenders peeped 
muddy roads, squalid houses, dump-heaps and fac- 
tories — the spawn of the city. The sticky rain 
fell dismally. I retired finally into my newspaper. 
I was not up that morning to the Emersonian task 
of finding the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos. 



66 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

Suddenly I was aroused by the exclamation of 
a woman in the next chair. I looked out. The 
rain had ceased. We were running into a won- 
der-world of crystal ice. A few moments more 
and the sun came out. The advertising signs 
had been left behind. Woods and fields came 
down to the track. And every tree, every bush, 
every blade of grass, every fence and wall and 
wire was covered with ice flashing its prismic 
colors. The little virgin birches were brazenly 
bowed with diamonds. Every shift of the scene 
brought a new and more dazzling splendor into 
the frame of the car window. 

Presently white flashed into the frame. We 
were out of the world of frozen rain into the 
world of winter snow. As we rolled along the 
high embankment over the Deerfield meadows 
the window held an exquisite view of that incom- 
parable of villages. Its one street lay clearly 
marked on the dazzling carpet of the intervale. 
The great elms, which in summer completely hide 
the dwellings beneath, were bare now, and each 
old house, square and solid, was heavily thatched 
with snow. The red brick museum gave the one 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 67 

touch of warm color. There was not even a 
sleigh in sight as this picture persisted a moment 
in the frame. The meadows stretched away 
white and bare and silent as when the Indians 
stole across them almost two centuries ago. The 
peace of the dead was over the town. Another 
instant, and the picture melted behind. The 
bustle of a junction station succeeded — the rush 
of excited life. 

Then once more we plunged into the white 
world of snow, till, as the sun sank low in the 
west, the window framed a dark, spruce-clad 
mountain wearing a pink hood, the mountain 
cold crept whistling in through the ventilators, 
and at twilight we stepped out into two feet of 
drift, to be informed that the thermometer was 
three degrees above zero. 

" It 's warmin' up considerable," said the stage 
driver, casually. " It was twenty-six below this 



mornin\" 



The day's ride in a train, with its landscape 
pictures flowing past, may be a lesson in geog- 
raphy to the little boy, or an essay on Nature and 
Society to the man. You wake up, perhaps, in 



68 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

a dim world that rolls away in high hills. Farms 
have pushed their clearings up amid the timber, 
or hamlets cluster in a valley. The lights of early 
morning twinkle in the houses. Some farmer is 
dressing by lamp-light. Perhaps you dressed by 
lamp-light to catch the train. Perhaps you only 
recall, as you lie in your berth and rub your eyes 
awake, those far-off days when you often saw the 
sun rise, days when life was as fresh as those hills 
which now rise, dew-washed and clean, beyond 
your car window, so high that to see the tops of 
them you have to crane your neck. If you are a 
boy, the mystery of what lies beyond those hills 
is heavy upon you. You think of other valleys 
and higher ranges, and your soul expands. Then 
suddenly the train swings round a bend. Per- 
haps you see your own locomotive, always a 
thrilling sight no matter what your age; and, 
at any rate, the car window encases for 
a moment the vista down the track instead 
of the habitual side view. Day is coming on 
rapidly. It flushes that hill into which the 
track seems to vanish like the Pie3 Piper, and 
shows you the green cleft under high ledges 




The window framed a dark, spruce-clad mountain wearing a pink hood 

See page 6j 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 69 

where the mountain river has bitten its way 
through. 

A moment, and you are in that cleft, under the 
shadow of the cliffs which make almost a second 
night as they tower over your window with their 
dark evergreens clinging to every ledge and 
cranny. A few miles more, and you are through 
the cleft in the mountains, into a second dawn, 
and are rolling along above a new and wider val- 
ley. You are on your way to the plains. You 
have the sensation of bursting through the moun- 
tain range. The window flashes a procession of 
great tree-trunks close at hand, and through these 
trunks you glimpse far below you the wide green 
intervale, misty with the low morning sun, a pic- 
ture of dazzling distances new-washed with the 
dawn. 

As the track drops down to the lower levels, 
stretches of forest alternate with ample green 
glades where the eye now enjoys the restful sense 
of flatness, and the occasional houses as they 
come into the picture and melt out again seem 
more substantial, wider of beam. The river, too, 
has taken on a less rapid pace, settling into 



70 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

stretches under the elms where it flows black and 
quiet through pasture-lands, and cows, lifting 
their placid faces, gaze at you as you pass, like a 
painting of Troyon set into the frame, savored 
for the instant, and as quickly removed. 

But the real lowlands are not yet. Again the 
train rumbles into the shadow of a rocky cut, 
emerging into a still flatter country, still more 
pastoral and cultivated, where the houses are 
more frequent and the traces of man over the 
landscape more apparent. You see teams crawl- 
ing on white roads. At a crossing the face of 
the gateman looms suddenly into the very fore- 
ground of your picture. He is waving his yellow 
flag. Behind him a horse dances on its hind legs, 
reined in by its driver. The faces of this driver 
and of the gateman are flashed upon the retina 
of your eye and persist in memory after they are 
put miles behind. Long afterward, you feel sure, 
you would know these men if you should meet 
them on a crowded street. As the sun climbs to 
the meridian and then begins to decline, your 
landscapes still flow past with ever-shifting 
charms. A shadowed cross-road runs away into 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 71 

the woods, calling you to follow it, calling with a 
voice that is almost instantly lost in the roar of 
the car-wheels and the forgetfulness of new 
sights. The world seems settling down into true 
lowland at last. The water-pools by the track 
are quite still now, holding the quiet reflections 
of the swamp maples or the light of the afternoon 
sun. You roll out of the swamp into broad 
meadows, where stately and graceful willows 
grow beside creeping waters and there is a sug- 
gestion of tide marshes in the distance. That 
suggestion of the sea is curiously exciting. It 
wakes the senses, grown sluggish, perhaps, with 
the fatigue of travel or dulled by the blur of 
nature's moving pictures. Alert, you watch for 
the first glimpse of the blue ocean, as the train 
rushes on. 

Perhaps you never quite see the ocean itself, 
but only a wide marsh of waving grasses, rib- 
boned by a quicksilver band of tide water, with 
the far-off bulwark of the dunes thrown up for 
an horizon line, and over all the great spaces of 
the sky where the free clouds race. Is not the 
suggestion of the sea hidden behind a level line 



j-2 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

of barren land, more potent than the sight of the 
sea itself to wake the imagination, to hint of mys- 
tery and wonder? Perhaps for the little boy, 
however, nothing can quite supply that first 
glimpse of the blue plain, where white sails flash 
and a steamer on the sky-line makes a trail of 
smoke. That glimpse he may have from his car 
window before the sun sets and the train once 
more turns inland on its way to the city. 

Now the roads which cross the track and wind 
over the cultivated hillsides are gray crushed 
stone. There is no longer any wildness. The 
farms suggest market gardening, the river is 
broader, deeper, as for commerce. Suddenly, 
alone on a pasture knoll, looms a signboard. It 
flashes into the view like a bomb explosion. It 
proclaims a sensational theatrical performance. 
It shrieks of cities, sophistication. It is followed, 
in the rapidly gathering twilight, by that peculiar 
squalor of houses and land which is so character- 
istic of the approaches to a great town. Perhaps 
the hills close in for a space, to make a gateway 
for the town. They seem to bring night with 
them. 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 73 

Through the gate of the hills the train rumbles, 
and emerges into the sudden glare of lamps, the 
rush and roar of factories, machine-shops, com- 
plicated and buzzing industry. Against the pal- 
ing west black chimney-stacks huddle like a forest 
of charred and naked trunks, belching toadstools 
of smoke upon the sky. Then tall buildings, their 
outlines pricked with golden lights, come into the 
picture. You look down brilliantly illuminated 
cross streets where street-cars crawl, motors and 
wagons pass and repass, hundreds of busy people 
throng the walks or pour in and out of the shops 
and houses. The train slows up. In the great 
terminal yard is a bewildering tangle of moving 
trains. Your own car suddenly passes out of the 
world of moving pictures into the train shed, 
comes to a stop, and you alight at last at your 
journey's end, in the heart of a city by the sea. 
Back there in the mountains where you woke in 
the morning the patient stars are hanging deeply 
over the fir-clad slopes and the silent valleys. 
Here you see no stars, only blazing lamps without 
end, making a second daylight in the noisy streets. 
Your pendulum has swung the full length of its 



74 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

arc. And, unless you are a stranger to this city, 
unless your ride from the station through its 
squares and arteries is a fresh spur to your curi- 
osity, are you not a little sorry that the railroad 
trip is done? Are you so old that the inconven- 
iences of travel outweigh its stimulation ? 

After all, curiosity is much like the love of 
freedom ; it is the possession of the passion which 
counts rather than the fulfilment. Ibsen was 
right in valuing freedom not at all, but in valu- 
ing the love of it and the struggle for it above 
everything else. So the satisfaction of curiosity 
is a curse if it leads to no wider curiosity. In a 
very real sense, mankind is the poorer for every 
new sea that is charted, every new continent 
mapped, every new reduction of the universe to 
immutable law. In its constant spur to curiosity 
and its persistent refusal of gratification, lies one 
of the great charms of a railroad journey. For 
the boy it stimulates imagination like almost 
nothing else. For the man it invites to those 
pleasant speculations which still maintain, in the 
midst of humdrum life, a little of the primitive 
mysteries. 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 75 

It may be the train stops at a junction, and on 
the cross track stands another train bearing the 
name of a different road. Possibly it is a smaller 
train, with old-fashioned cars. It runs up that 
single track into the wooded country, toward 
towns which suggest by their very names an 
older and quieter order. One is almost irresist- 
ibly tempted to climb aboard the old-fashioned 
cars, to chat with the genial conductor who is 
bowing to all his passengers as they leave the 
main line for his branch, and to ride up into that 
different world. There are such little branch 
lines not twenty miles from New York. There is 
such a one leaving the Fitchburg at Hoosac Tun- 
nel and following the Deerfield River up its wild 
gorges into Vermont. There is such a one in 
Rhode Island, where the limiteds thunder through 
Wood River Junction, and only the locals stop, 
to let you speculate pleasantly on the rural allure- 
ments reached by the Hope Valley Railroad. 
Who knows what Hope Valley is like? Not I, 
certainly; nor do I wish to, lest it be something 
less delectable than its name. But the sight of 
that little antiquated train of one car and a toy 



76 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

locomotive puffing on the siding, waiting for the 
occasional passenger for Hope Valley, has given 
me many a delightful moment. Hope Valley! 
It is a symbol of our promised land! 

How pleasant a view there is, too, at Princeton 
Junction, where again the limiteds thunder 
through, or pant to rest for a brief instant while 
young men with pipes and suit-cases alight. Be- 
hind the station stands the little train awaiting 
them. Its track stretches away over the level 
plain at right angles, to the distant hill where the 
college towers rise above the trees. If you, too, 
leave the limited, with its roar and rumble, your 
nostrils are filled with the fragrance of country 
air even as you alight. The little train moves 
slowly and quietly through the fields, and brings 
you presently under the shadow of that exquisite, 
scholastic Gothic entrance-gate, into the peace 
and well-bred seclusion of an old university. 
Yet you need not alight from the limited to se- 
cure this sensation. Hurrying through to Phila- 
delphia or Washington on your urgent business, 
for it may be you are what we call " a man of 
affairs," you glimpse the little train on its branch 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 77 

line, the level fields, the distant towers, and there 
comes over you the thought of the quiet scholastic 
existence, of youthful days spent in ideal pur- 
suits, of lives passed in the grave quest of learn- 
ing or the grave instruction of others. Then you 
thunder on between the signboards of commerce, 
bent upon your own quest of dollars. But does 
not the picture persist, and its attendant mood? 
Does not your curiosity awake to speculate on 
other modes of life than yours? Is Princeton 
merely a memory for you of a place where you 
once came to see a football game? 

The allurement of the country highway run- 
ning on beside the track or crossing it at right 
angles and laying its white ribbon into the dis- 
tance is one of the most potent charms of car- 
window pictures. It may be the train, winding 
along a river, pauses at a town. Here the high- 
way is glimpsed as Main Street; it is lined with 
stores ; teams, or, in winter, " pungs," stand by 
the curb. There is the bustle of communal life 
at the station. Friends are greeting the arrivals ; 
men and women smilingly give over their luggage 
to eager hands. You, at your window, feel curi- 



78 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ously lonely, neglected. Out of the village, Main 
Street becomes the country highway once more. 
It follows the track a little way, then suddenly 
turns to the river, crosses that on an old, wooden, 
covered bridge, still gay with the posters of last 
summer's circus, and vanishes on the other side 
into the rolling country. For an instant the vista 
through the old bridge is flashed into your win- 
dow-frame, like the view through a telescope. 
You almost smell its curious odor and hear the 
echo of your horses' hoofs. Then you are past. 
You see the road winding up a hill on the farther 
bank, into the timber or the upland clearings. 
You know that over those pleasant hills lie the 
farms where the men and women live who greeted 
their friends at the station. That highway is the 
link between the railroad and a community of 
your fellow creatures. What little epitome of life 
does that community not hold, set on its gracious 
hillsides, ribboned by the dusty road ? You specu- 
late, you crane your neck for a last view of the 
highway, faint and far-off now across the river 
behind ; and then the train swings round a bend, 
the woods come down to the river banks, and you 



THE LANDSCAPE THAT FLOWS 79 

wait for the next highway to take your fancy into 
the world of men. 

There is something a little pitiful about the 
person who must always have " something to 
read on the train." The child wants nothing to 
read on the train, for a story book with pictures 
on every page is constantly being unrolled for 
him beyond the car windows. Or, perhaps, as 
Hans Andersen wrote a Bilder-buch ohne Bilder, 
nature paints for the child in the train a story- 
book without stories. Nature presents the pic- 
tures in lavish profusion and lets the child's im- 
agination build the shifting, kaleidoscopic tale. 
Yet how infinitely less material the child pos- 
sesses to build with than you or I, sitting in the 
opposite seat, absorbed in a book! We have the 
accumulated experience of years ; he has scarcely 
more than the experience of his own front yard, 
perhaps, and the village street. Yet he has some- 
thing far more precious than experience, which 
we have lost. He has imagination, wonder, curi- 
osity. There are no simple primroses in his 
world. That is why his face is glued to the car 
window-pane. Our primroses are all simple 



80 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

primroses. That is why our faces are fixed upon 
a book. Who has the better of it, the child or the 
man ? To this you answer, " That depends upon 
the book." To this I can only reply by inviting 
your attention to the titles of the books sold upon 
trains. 





V 
BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 
GREAT deal of gush is written about 
birds. Just why these honest, clean, 
musical little monogamists should peculiarly in- 
spire the sentimental, the present writer has never 
been able to determine. But they do, and a special 
literary quality and emotional poignancy is sup- 
posed to reside in such a sentence as, " I saw three 
robins, two white-throated sparrows, a red- 
winged black-bird, and a meadow-lark to-day. 
Ah, how sweet is Nature and how good is God ! " 
Personally, we fail to find this sort of thing any 
more thrilling or " literary " than the telephone 
directory. But for the writer (other than the 



82 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

technical ornithologist, who, of course, is entitled 
to the respect due any bona fide scientist) who can 
catch in words the peculiar quality of a bird's 
song, the hermit's, say, or oven-bird's, who can 
relate the bird to his environment and make us 
feel him as an added charm to the particular woods 
or fields he inhabits, we yield homage. How Tho- 
reau, in a magic sentence, communicates the charm 
of an old road out of Concord, by the happy men- 
tion of a wild flower and a wayside bird, dropping 
the one golden epithet where it does the work! 

Alas! it is not given most of us to write like 
Thoreau; indeed, few of us would dare to live 
like Thoreau. But many more of us than do 
could find an added charm in nature by a more 
delicate observation of wild flowers in relation 
to the landscape rather than a vase in our parlor, 
and a more delicate observation of birds in rela- 
tion to their environment of woods and fields and 
marshes. The charm of the hermit thrush's 
song, for instance, resides only in part in its pure 
musical quality. It resides also in the subtle 
blending of that quality with the peculiar hush 
and cool mystery of the deep woods, with the 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 83 

sombre whisper of the evergreens, with the pure, 
brooding colors of twilight in the west. 

So there are birds of the orchard and garden, 
birds of the fields and meadows, birds of the 
marshes, and birds of the woods, each with a pe- 
culiar character of song to trained ears, and each, 
when known, thereafter associated with a special 
landscape, so that one comes to feel them as a 
part of this landscape, and looks no more for 
raspberries in an upland pasture by the woods 
than for white-throated sparrows, or for apple 
blossoms in an old orchard in May than for the 
warblers or peewees twinkling in the leaves. 

The fat robin hopping down a garden path or 
dabbing for worms on the lawn is a familiar 
friend. There is something, too, about his song 
which touches a homely domestic chord in our 
hearts. He is apostrophized from a window by 
Sill, in his famous poem beginning: 



a 



Singing in the rain, robin? 



His song came up from the orchard to Mac- 
Dowell plaintively, related to human things, and 
the composer wrote his lied, " The robin sings in 



84 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the apple-tree." The robin's song has no wild- 
ness in it to our ears, but brings to memory a vil- 
lage street and children playing, the scent of 
apple blossoms, or fresh mornings when we 
awoke and lay drowsily in bed while the fra- 
grance of lilac came through the open window, 
and mingled with the domestic music of the 
house — the rattle of dishes, the rumble of voices 
in the room below — was borne in the cheery 
warble of the redbreasts. No less than the burst- 
ing pink of orchards is the robin a part of return- 
ing spring about our dwellings, familiar, near. 

Like him, too, are the blue-birds and the wrens, 
with their suggestion of human habitations near 
by; and humming-birds to recall trumpet-vines 
or old-fashioned gardens. The brilliant orange 
oriole, with his strident, commanding call, flashes 
through the orchard trees or swings his nest from 
a drooping elm limb even over the village street. 
You see the flame-red of the scarlet tanager 
against the green of fir-trees in the deep woods, 
but the oriole abides near by, and his peculiar 
flash of orange belongs to the color scheme of 
streets and orchards. 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 85 

When the orchard has laid aside its pink for 
green, and then its green for the gray of bare 
trunks and limbs, certain friendly birds still 
linger, and all winter through add life and sound 
to the desolation of our gardens. The chicka- 
dees, fat little fellows in flocks, peck for insects 
on an old thorn-apple like a new crop of fuzzy 
fruit, and their song is as cheerful as sleigh-bells. 
Nuthatches and woodpeckers go up and down the 
trunks, tapping a tune. You may see chickadees 
out in the woods, busy about their affairs, but 
their song seems never quite right, in winter, un- 
less there is a dwelling in sight. They and their 
winter companions seem to draw near to man in 
the desolate seasons, for mutual comfort. Hence 
the song of the chickadee is perhaps the friend- 
liest sound in nature. 

From the orchard, too, on an autumn midnight, 
comes the mournful whistle of a screech-owl. 
Most of us who have heard the screech-owl at all 
have heard its call drifting down from an old 
orchard on a frosty October night. The chill of 
coming winter, the cattle stamping in dark 
stables, a dim and ghostly world stretching over 



86 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

garnered fields to the mystery of the woods, and 
a gnarled, ancient orchard up the slope seen 
phantomlike under a waning moon — these are 
the setting for the screech-owl's mournful 
whistle. I can at this moment shut my eyes, re- 
produce that whistle in my throat, and bring back 
to memory, as if it were yesterday, the scene as 
my boyhood eyes saw it from my chamber win- 
dow, whence I peeped with frosted breath before 
diving into bed, and I can actually smell (for all 
the tobacco smoke in my present study) the pecul- 
iar odor of the cold October night air, and feel 
again a vague, almost terrifying melancholy chill 
in my heart as, in the darkness, I heard from the 
orchard that reiterated whoo-oo-oo-oo. Like the 
whip-poor-will on the pasture rail on a hot even- 
ing of July, this other night-singer of New Eng- 
land seems to dwell just on the skirts of human 
habitations and to keep our souls reminded of 
some lurking sadness in the world. 

From the orchard to the river banks and 
marshes is but a step in my Berkshire home, yet 
the bird life is quite different. Only the yellow 
warblers and the king-birds seem to find, in early 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 87 

spring (and the king-birds the summer through), 
the apple-trees and the willows of equal attrac- 
tiveness. Up in the garden and orchard it is the 
blue-birds who herald the returning season, then 
those migrating transients, the fox sparrows, 
then the robins. Down on the river reaches it is 
the red-winged blackbirds. A broad stretch of 
meadow and marsh, a silver thread of water 
winding through, now but just freed of drifting 
ice, the hills beyond, and a sky soft and warm at 
last with spring — and suddenly of a morning 
the blackbirds are here, chattering in rushes and 
willows, tossing their dark bodies against the 
blue, and showing in a flash of sun the red upon 
their wings. They belong no less to these broad, 
free river reaches than the tamer robins to the 
garden paths, and the picture is no nearer com- 
plete without them. 

Along the river, too, dwell other birds that give 
it a peculiar quality of its own, even from the 
merely pictorial side. The great blue heron is a 
familiar resident of our streams. You never see 
him in the orchard or the wood. But as you slip 
noiselessly down the current in a canoe you may 



88 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

round a bend where the willows dip the stream 
or the white birches gaze at their white reflec- 
tions, and come upon him wading on a sand-bar, 
his long neck alternately shortening and length- 
ening as he preens his feathers or darts his great 
bill for fish, his beautiful blue plumage over the 
rippling water, and his graceful form, making a 
picture as Japanese as anything in Japan. One 
of the caddies at our golf club caught an injured 
heron last summer, and carried it home in his 
arms, in imminent danger of having his eyes 
pecked out, and deposited it in the chicken yard 
— the strangest contrast you ever saw ! But the 
heron recovered in the night, and in the morning 
he had disappeared, gone back, no doubt, to his 
Japanese screen. 

Along the river, too, the crested kingfisher, 
with his white breast, is prominent on a tawny 
willow spray, the swallows scoop, and the bit- 
terns. Over a harbor, how much of the charm 
resides in the exquisite grace of the swooping 
gulls. No less over our inland waterways and 
marshes, a peculiar charm resides in the sight and 
sound of the special bird life. Creep up a tiny 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 89 

creek in a canoe, and hear the protesting mew of 
a cat-bird in the alders. You may hear him on 
the edge of the woods, or even in your own gar- 
den, but there the sound has no particular flavor, 
certainly no pleasant one. But startle him in his 
native alders, and how sweet the harsh sound 
suddenly becomes, the very essence of the quiet, 
sun-flecked thicket and dappled stream, and his 
exquisite, gun-metal body amid the gray twigs 
might be the fairy of the swamp. 

As we pass toward the deep woods we go 
through a regular succession of bird life, and it 
is curious how often the transition from the 
humbler songs of the meadow birds and the 
tweetings of the inhabitants of upland fields and 
berry pastures to the final glories of the thrushes' 
music is made by the white-throated sparrow at 
the edge of the forest, that sweet little songster 
who flutes his perfectly enunciated triplets with 
the technical perfection of the thrush but without 
the thrush's woodland quality. 

In our mountain country bobolinks and larks 
and song-sparrows are melodious in the mead- 
ows, so constantly melodious at times that we 



go BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

scarce hear their song, any more than the 
cricket's chime or the ticking of a familiar clock. 
As we climb higher into the pastures and berry 
patches, the world grows more quiet, and we 
pause to watch a chewink perched on a twig 
against the background of field and mountain, his 
throat a-tremble with his song. Here the spar- 
rows of all sorts are more readily heard, also, 
and here most often is to be seen the brilliant 
plumage of the indigo-bird. And on the edge of 
the timber the white-throated sparrow, or Pea- 
body, most freely and frequently plays his reedy 
pipe. The sun is warm in the upland pastures, 
and bird notes are warm, too, intimate, close to 
the ground. 

Then we enter the cathedral dimness of the 
woods. How still it suddenly becomes! How 
mysterious ! How alluring ! We are in a differ- 
ent world, and as our silent footsteps carry us 
deeper the hush steals over our very spirits. 
Then on the stillness suddenly rings out the inde- 
scribable fairy clarion of the hermit-thrush, the 
most beautiful sound in nature, the soul of the 
woods made audible. Seldom enough will you see 



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Then on the stillness suddenly rings out the indescribable fairy clarion 
of the hermit-thrush, the most beautiful sound in nature, the soul 
of the woods made audible 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 91 

a thrush against the solemn tree trunks with 
stabs of sky between. He seems rather a disem- 
bodied voice than a bird. But especially at twi- 
light, at the still-time of the world when the sol- 
emn glow of sunset illumines the west, his song 
is the distilled essence of loveliness and the great 
peace and mystery of nature. " Cool bars of mel- 
ody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning 
or evening," said Thoreau of his song, and 
though Thoreau was never able to distinguish be- 
tween the wood-thrush and the hermit, it is true 
of either that in its notes " there is the liquid cool- 
ness of things that are just drawn from the bot- 
tom of springs. " 

How much of this quality in the thrush's song 
is due to the actual physical effect of his environ- 
ment, or how much is due to our human associa- 
tion of ideas, we do not propose to hazard a guess. 
Mr. Stone, the artist for this book, would have 
it that all birds have drawn a quality in their 
songs from their physical needs and adaptabil- 
ities. Certainly the thrushes, vireos, and war- 
blers of the woods have a woodland quality, apart 
from human association of ideas; but can as 



92 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

much be said for that other forest dweller, the 
oven-bird, with its teach-er, teach-er, t each-erf 
And why should the poor grackle emit his abor- 
tive squeak, as if he needed oiling, above green 
meadows where the lark pours out his rapture? 
The question — if there be a question — is one 
for the more scientific to settle. We are content, 
for ourselves, to let the mere association of ideas 
give to each bird song its peculiar charm and fit- 
ness. The power to associate ideas is what makes 
man a reasoning animal, then an imaginative and 
creative one. The association of ideas makes 
poetry, and without its power to evoke such asso- 
ciations in us, even Keats's " Ode to the Nightin- 
gale " would be but prosy stuff. 

How much, then, of the charm of a chickadee's 
song or a thrush's, of the sight of a nuthatch up- 
side down on a gray apple-tree trunk or a blue 
heron wading in rippled water, resides in the 
memories it challenges, the associations it 
arouses ! The chickadee in winter, cheerful little 
voice, sings of sleigh-bells and a white world, of 
red window squares seen through the cedars, of 
wood smoke and pink cheeks. The thrush stirs 



BIRD ENVIRONMENTS 93 

us by his vocal perfection, but stirs us, too, be- 
cause his voice is associated with forest mystery 
and twilight peace, and though heard occasion- 
ally at noonday on a village street (we had a 
wood-thrush in our yard last summer) invariably 
brings the listener up sharp and sets his thoughts 
a-dream. Always there is something pictorial, 
Japanese, about the heron. He was born a 
wader, and to see him is to think water at the 
base of a decorative design. 

To watch the birds in relation to their environ- 
ment, then, to listen for their peculiar songs in 
place and season, is to add new charm to each 
feathered warbler, because it is to add new asso- 
ciations in your mind; and it is to add, as well, 
new charm to each peculiar phase of the land- 
scape — marsh or swamp or berry patch or wood 
— because to each belongs its special bird life, 
and the white kingfisher on the tawny willow 
spray above the river is as much the crowning 
touch to the intimate river view as is the song of 
the robin the crowning touch to the peace of your 
old garden under its apple blossoms in the warm 
spring rain. 













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VI 
THE HARBOR 

INCE man first went down to the sea in 
ships, harbors have been his care, his pro- 
tection, his delight. Where lonely sea meets 
barren shore, where the land pushes out a lean 
finger into the blue or buffets the breakers with a 
granite fist, the eye may rejoice and the spirit 
grow lyrical. But it is the sheltered harbor, 
where the great ships come in to lay their sea- 
borne burdens at the city's feet, which is the real 
portal to the ocean road; and at that portal 
man finds most delight of the deep, because he 
seems there at once its master and under the spell 
of its mystery. He sees his patient tugs at work, 



THE HARBOR 95 

his long docks laden with freight, his city coming 
down expectant to the water's edge ; and he sees, 
too, the battered tramps steaming up from under 
the world rim, the liners going out on their far 
voyaging. He scents together the odor of the 
town and the racy salt of the sea. He is aware 
alike of familiar things and strange. We cease 
soon enough to greet with fresh wonder the sight 
of a city, and the unlimited ocean may grow for 
many of us monotonous or sad. But the harbor 
is a perpetual wonder and daily a new delight. 

There are many harbors intrinsically more 
beautiful than that of New York, but few more 
interesting and none more busy. The elderly 
Southern visitor from Shreveport, La., who re- 
fused to utter any expressions of astonishment 
at the Subway crowds, the East River bridges, 
the electric illuminations on the Rialto, the multi- 
tudinous sky-scrapers, but who stood upon the 
Battery sea-wall for a time watching the harbor, 
and then exclaimed with deep feeling, " This sure 
is the Shrevepo't o' the No'th, sah ! " aptly ex- 
pressed the commercial importance of New York 
Harbor. But he did not express its peculiar 



g6 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

acquired beauty; he could not, for he did not 
know it well enough. You cannot learn to know 
New York Harbor from the sea-wall of the Bat- 
tery. You must view it at all times, from all 
points and angles, before its multitudinous and 
ever-changing delights grow into an impression 
of beauty so strong and so memorable that it can 
never fade, so strong, indeed, that you will love 
this smudgy bay almost above all others, finding 
them tame, or even colorless, by comparison. 

New York Harbor is divided by The Narrows, 
that channel passage between Staten Island and 
Brooklyn, into two bays, the Upper and the 
Lower, much like a huge dumb-bell, save that the 
Lower Bay is the larger, extending south from 
Quarantine to Sandy Hook, west to Raritan Bay, 
and merging eastward with the open Atlantic. 
The great volume of the Hudson, pouring past 
Manhattan Island, through the Upper Bay and 
The Narrows deposits its load of soil in this 
Lower Bay, where red buoys mark the difficult 
channel and the larger liners sometimes go 
aground in the fog. It is seventeen miles as the 
crow flies from the New York City Hall to 



THE HARBOR 97 

Sandy Hook Light. It is only six miles to St. 
George, Staten Island, which marks the head of 
The Narrows. The Upper Bay, or harbor 
proper, is thus far removed from the open sea. 
It is almost a lake, some five miles on either diam- 
eter, made by the confluence of the Hudson and 
East rivers. Within its area, and in the rivers 
on either side of that long, narrow strip of divid- 
ing rock called Manhattan Island, half the water 
commerce of a continent is conducted; and over 
it on ferry-boats and bridges or under it in steel 
and concrete tubes daily pass so many thousands 
of people that the head is dizzy reckoning their 
number. At the head of it rises that Andean 
range of sky-scrapers on the southern nose of 
Manhattan, man's mightiest material accomplish- 
ment since the Pyramids. Over it drifts the 
smoke from a myriad chimneys on the shore, a 
myriad funnels on the water. Yet the sea fog 
works up through The Narrows with the smell of 
brine ; a coast schooner beats in under dirty can- 
vas, with a broken wing, perhaps, from some wild 
gale off Hatteras ; the brilliant sun flashes from a 
gull's breast and the steel-gray, dancing waves — 



98 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and the call of the deep comes over you. Your 
eye and your heart follow that steamer dropping 
down channel with the tide. You feel, as the 
wash of the liner gently jiggles your ferry-boat, 
the heave and swing of the long Atlantic rollers. 
The harbor asks its toll of dreams from those 
who cross upon it. As little Will-o'-the-mill stood 
upon his hilltop and looked down into the plain 
to the far city, his eyes big with wistfulness, so 
you may see the army of those who " commute/' 
leaving their day's toil in town, stand on the deck 
of the ferry-boats at night and look through The 
Narrows down the ocean road, the ancient call 
of the sea not yet silent in their hearts, that siren 
call of freedom and adventure. 

What gives to New York Harbor its unique 
aspect, of course, and its dominant note of power, 
is that Andean pile of sky-scrapers which rises 
at its head, crowned by the peak of the Singer 
Tower and flanked by the leaping spans of two 
great suspension bridges. To the voyager com- 
ing up the bay, after his ship has slipped through 
The Narrows past the two forts and under the 
green hills of Staten Island, this mountain range 



THE HARBOR 99 

seems to rise like mortared Sierras out of the sea, 
hazed with smoke and blue with distance. As he 
draws nearer and the buildings take separate 
form, their tiers of windows proclaiming their 
incredible height, his first impression of New 
York, of the New World, is that of an architec- 
tural miracle, a Babylonic dream. A first im- 
pression is seldom a last ; but though the wonder 
of these buildings soon wears off for those who 
fly up and down in their elevators or dash about 
in the canon slits between them, and their beauty 
is converted to ugliness for some when they can- 
not be viewed as a group, for him who views 
them from the harbor or the opposite shores their 
spell of wonder never grows less, their beauty 
never vanishes. Viewed as a part of the harbor, 
as its great head wall, as the crown of the pic- 
ture, they are sometimes of ethereal lightness, 
sometimes of Dantean strength and massiveness, 
but always beautiful. 

And their aspect over the harbor is never twice 
the same, from day to day, from hour to hour, 
nor the same from any two points of sight. If 
you take a Thirty-ninth Street, Brooklyn, ferry 



ioo BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

from the Battery, passing through Buttermilk 
Channel where the long docks face across to Gov- 
ernor's Island, you may look back presently and 
see the green parade-ground like a lawn at the 
feet of the sky-scrapers; the intervening water 
is quite concealed. To one side of you is the Erie 
Basin, rilled with the steamers of all nations, like 
a corral of strange sea-cattle; to the other side 
the sailing-ships lie at anchor, between you and 
the main channel. Behind, leaping up apparently 
out of a green lawn, are the peaks of lower Man- 
hattan, flying their flags and their white steam 
plumes gayly against the blue. That is when the 
light is clear and sharp. On such a morning you 
might have stood upon a dock in Jersey City 
and seen the sun rise behind the long range of 
towered buildings, transfiguring them. On such 
a morning they stand in sharp silhouette against 
the dawn sky, their separate peaks distinct, their 
bases a blurred mass. They are painted in the 
flat. Then the sun comes up. Through the cross 
streets it shoots level rays. Down amid the caves 
and canons these rays pierce, touching cornices 
and windows with gold and bringing out as if by 



THE HARBOR 101 

magic the third dimension of the picture. Up 
against the new-washed sky the smoke plumes 
grow rosy. Tall building casts shadows upon tall 
building, mutually supplying the solidity which 
the isolated steel-frame structure with its mere 
shell of stone cannot suggest; and as the sun it- 
self at last appears above them the whole river 
seems suddenly to wake to life, and to pour its 
commerce round the city's feet. 

It is seldom, however, save at early morning or 
on a Sunday, that the atmosphere about these 
mortared mountains is free from smoke or haze. 
When once the city an3 the harbor have awaked, 
an aerial gauze is spread upon the lower island 
and the high buildings but loom the larger 
through it, with deeper shadows or softer out- 
lines or lovelier colors. There are steel-gray 
days, when the sun is overcast and a wind is up; 
and the white-caps on the harbor, the steam 
plumes from the buildings, the foam-fleck in the 
wake of tugs and ferry-boats, are spatters of 
china-white on a monochromatic picture. There 
are Japanese days, when a thin sea fog is in, 
though the sun is bright and cheerful. Then the 



102 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

harbor, the sky, and the city are but three deli- 
cately differentiated shades of the same blue, and 
the great buildings loom remote and ethereal, 
once more painted in two dimensions. On such a 
day the gay flags whipping out high aloft and the 
red stacks of the liners at their piers are gaudy 
spots of color, and usually some tug trails a 
gigantic feather of velvety black smoke across 
the picture. There are days of lowering rain and 
mist, when the Singer Tower goes out of sight 
in the clouds and the city, from the harbor, be- 
comes almost unbelievable, while the screeching 
whistles take on a terrifying tone. There are 
days, too, of copper sunsets over the low-lying 
Jersey shore, when, from the water, you see tier 
after tier of windows on Manhattan turn to 
molten fire, and from up the darkening river 
come sudden flashes of copper flame from the 
windows of the ferry-boats. 

With the coming of early night in winter, all 
the tiers of windows up the cliff walls of the sky- 
scrapers become checks of gold. As darkness 
deepens and the outlines of the buildings grow 
more indistinct, the Singer Tower, bathed in the 



THE HARBOR 103 

white glow of its invisible searchlights, seems a 
strange snow-capped peak lording it over the 
lesser heights, and the wake of your ferry-boat 
on the water is a purple lane stretching back to 
the land of wonder. When the outlines of the 
buildings have completely disappeared, the in- 
numerable window lights are the street lamps of 
a city running up a great hill, as if New York 
were builded on a mountainside, and the white 
tower, instead of appearing suspended in midair, 
seems to crown this eminence. Now, looking 
away from the city, you see the ferry-boats, with 
their rows of windows each with a light twink- 
ling through it, moving over the water like ani- 
mated birthday cakes. 

By day or night, the humble voyage to Staten 
Island is a perpetual delight. By day, it may be, 
a tug goes past in a keen, off-shore wind, towing 
a brace of inland canal-boats. These barges 
flaunt an independent life of their own under the 
very nose of New York. Geraniums bloom by 
the tiller, the domestic linen is flapping on a line, 
a face glances up at you from the cabin door with 
only the mildest interest. What has the slow, 



104 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

peaceful, nerveless life of canals to do with this 
great town and panting tug and white-capped, 
racing bay ? The tug, almost as if it were aware 
of the incongruity, as if it were caught associ- 
ating with a country cousin, pushes on hastily, 
warned by the hoarse, rattling, bass bellow of a 
liner coming down the channel. The liner goes 
past without a sound save the occasional roar of 
her whistle, her passengers high above you hang- 
ing over the rail and looking back at New York. 
But in the anchorage west of the channel, from 
the Statue of Liberty on, the rusty tramp ships 
point into the tide without life or motion, wearily 
resting. If the day is foggy, they cut black 
against the vast gray blank of sky and water, the 
sooty laborers of the deep, and Liberty looms 
large and ghostly behind them. 

On such a day of fog, too, when the city might 
be a hundred miles away, it often happens that in 
half the circumference of the horizon nothing will 
cut against the pale blue or the gray immensity 
but a single tug, sending up a gigantic mushroom 
of smoke which moves along with the boat as if 
its stem were stuck fast in the funnel, and tones 



THE HARBOR 105 

so softly into the mist that the brush of a Corot 
might have painted it. In the fog, indeed, there 
is the constant excitement of sudden, unexpected 
picture, or sharp meetings with sea fellows. 
Warned in advance by the bellow of her whistle, 
you may sometimes greet a monster liner coming 
up from Quarantine, which she was able to reach 
before the fog bank caught her to hold her till 
morning anchored outside the Hook. A pigmy 
tug runs on ahead, like a little dog, and even when 
her towering prow and lofty stacks are visible, 
her stern is lost in the mystery. When all the 
fabulous length of her has slipped past, her decks 
crowded with men and women peering cityward, 
and when the deafening vibration of her whistle 
has grown fainter, you hear on your own star- 
board bow the mournful fog-bell off St. George, 
and see emerge through the mist the humble 
wharves of Staten Island. 

Across the Kill von Kull, at Bayonne, is a smel- 
ter chimney several hundred feet tall, which 
pours out a perpetual stream of pale, yellowish 
smoke. When the wind is west, this smoke drifts 
directly over Staten Island. One afternoon, as 



106 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the ferry-boat approached the slip, I saw the sun 
piercing down through this haze, carrying the 
shadow of St. George Hill darkly over the water 
to the east as far as the government anchorage, 
and there striking full upon a gray battleship 
and her collier. It was ridiculously as if a spot- 
light in the second balcony of a smoky theatre 
were directed upon the star performer on the 
stage; yet it was all on so vast a scale that you 
bowed in admiration. The grim iron hulk of the 
fighter seemed almost self-consciously aware of 
the dramatic effect. There is something a bit 
theatric about an ironclad always. This one was, 
for the space of several minutes, the centre of 
every gaze on the ferry-boat. Here for once, at 
least, the implication of sex we have placed upon 
ships seemed amply justified ! 

Just below Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island 
is South Beach, and there on a clear day you may 
look across the yellow sand and the strip of bright 
blue water in The Narrows to the green shore of 
Brooklyn, while to your right, beyond the two 
piles of red brick buildings on the Quarantine 
islands, the Lower Bay stretches out to open sea. 




A pigmy tug runs on ahead, like a little dog, and even when her towering 
prow and lofty stacks are visible, her stern is lost in the mystery 

See page ioj 



THE HARBOR 107 

New York is invisible somewhere back to the 
left, and this narrow strip of vivid blue is the 
ocean road leading from her gates. As you sit 
in the warm sand, watching the white yawls skim 
back and forth or a three-master beat in against 
wind and tide, you suddenly see a red prow push 
out from behind the rampart of Fort Wadsworth. 
Silently, without smoke or churn, as if she were 
drawn along by an invisible wire, the steamer 
passes you close by, swings toward the Ambrose 
Channel, and heads for the open sea. Then an- 
other comes, and another. Red stacks or yellow 
or black, German or British or French flags (and 
only too infrequently the Stars and Stripes), pro- 
claim the ships of this transatlantic line or that. 
Some of the smaller vessels are coasters or deep- 
sea tramps. That great black hulk with four red 
stacks, which hides half the Brooklyn shore, is 
the Mauretania. The day's exit has begun. The 
first ship is already a speck on the horizon. Be- 
hind her, down the Lower Bay, follows the pro- 
cession. To see these great ships coming through 
The Narrows, one after the other, from the in- 
visible city and standing out to all the ports of 



108 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the world is to hold a vision of the commercial 
importance of the town and the harbor more over- 
whelming, perhaps, than any which a nearer view 
affords or which any statistics can supply. And 
you, it may be, are sitting the while in a bathing- 
suit on the warm sand, basking like a savage in 
the sun and the clean salt air ! 

There are certain pleasures permitted to those 
we pharisaically call " the lower classes " which 
atone in no small measure for the lack of wealth 
or a place in the social register. One of these is 
the pleasure of eating fruit or cookies or buns in 
public places, if you chance to be hungry. An- 
other is the pleasure of going down the harbor by 
boat to Coney Island on a hot summer night. 
The boat, an old-fashioned side-wheeler, drops 
down the Hudson from Harlem, making her last 
stop at Pier One, at the Battery, where a swelter- 
ing mob waits to crowd upon her already crowded 
decks. You must push and scramble in the ap- 
proved New York fashion if you would secure a 
place near the rail, and your nose will be assaulted 
by the smell of stale " refreshments " and your 
ears by the inharmonious strains of a band of 



THE HARBOR 109 

musicians, sawing out a popular tune. But after 
the walking-beam is once more in motion and the 
evening breeze over the water carries the sound 
and odor astern, the harbor is spread for your 
delight. 

Perhaps a last hot orange flare of sunset re- 
mains in the sky over the low Jersey shore, but 
night has dusked the Brooklyn bank. Behind 
you the Singer Tower raises its shaft of pale 
light, and the trains crawl like glow-worms over 
the high-flung web of Brooklyn Bridge. As the 
boat passes down well to the east of the channel, 
the fiery flare from a blast-furnace reddens the 
horizon, and against it two stand-pipes on iron 
stilts are suddenly thrown into silhouette out of 
the night, like huge daddy-long-legs striding 
along the top of the docks. You go past a der- 
rick lighter, too, like a huge inanimate spider on 
its back towed by a water-bug, and slip almost 
in among the fleet of sailing-ships anchored off 
Gowanus Bay. How silently, mysteriously, they 
ride at anchor in the night, their bare spars and 
faint web of rigging black against the sky, their 
red and green lights alone giving sign of life! 



no BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

Perhaps another comes to join them even as 
you pass, her ghostly sails booming suddenly 
at you out of the dark, or sliding down with 
a rattle of tackle and the hoarse shouts of the 
crew. 

Through The Narrows the lines of twinkling 
lamps on either shore run on as far as the dark, 
ominous battlements of the forts, and then the 
Lower Bay widens ahead, the great beacon of 
Sandy Hook Light flashes at regular intervals 
seemingly out of the limitless water, and the wind 
freshens, grows more salt, brings to stifled nos- 
trils a breath of brine. A short while, and the 
excursion boat rounds the end of Sea Gate and 
rolls on the dying ground swell from the open 
Atlantic. 

And there, directly before you, though for 
some time you have detected its highest tower 
over the land, Coney Island pricks its incandes- 
cent battlements upon the night and turns to 
troubled gold the moving waters at its feet. A 
tinsel, tawdry thing by day, a delirium of shabby 
make-believe, by night it is a dream mirage rising 
out of the ocean, a towered city builded all of 



THE HARBOR in 

golden lamps, with splashes here and there of red 
or green; and the sound of it, coming over the 
surf as the steamer moves in to the pier, is the 
vast, happy roar of a carnival. 

The Coney Island boat on its return is no less 
heavily laden, but the crowds are sleepy now and 
the atrocious band is silent. In the shadows of 
the stacks, or unashamedly on the open decks, 
girls lay their heads upon their lovers' shoulders, 
or, more often, it must be confessed, 't is the mas- 
culine head which is pillowed. The children 
sprawl in slumber, their grimy hands clutching a 
wooden spade or a half -eaten pop-corn ball. A 
last look eastward before the boat enters The 
Narrows shows the Dreamland tower at Coney 
still illuminated, but the window squares on the 
Brooklyn bank and the hills of Staten Island are 
dark now. The shore is sleeping, too. Entering 
the Upper Bay, you know how late the hour is, 
because the Singer Tower is invisible. The 
searchlights which play upon it have been extin- 
guished. Only a faint rosy haze of light, re- 
flected up on the sky from the street-lamps, pro- 
claims the city. Midnight has struck. The boat 



ii2 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

churns on past the sleeping fleet of sailing-vessels 
to the right, the long line of deep-sea tramps an- 
chored under the torch of Liberty to the left. 
There is no sign of life on any of them. A 
ferry-boat goes past, her decks almost deserted. 
Around the nose of the Battery a tug is creeping 
with a string of black barges in tow ; the harbor 
night shift are toiling in the dark. Through the 
trees on Battery Park winds the glow-worm of 
an L-train. Above the Battery loom the mon- 
strous, indistinct cliff walls of the sky-scrapers, 
and a slit of night sky between them proclaims 
the existence of Broadway. As the sleepy crowds 
on the boat clamber down the gang-plank, this 
dim, gargantuan pile of brick and mortar seems 
to swallow them up. They become dehumanized. 
They vanish into the dark pier-shed like black 
corn into a hopper. They are converted into mere 
atoms of the city's swarming life. 

The wheels churn again, the boat moves up the 
river under the stars, past the endless mountain- 
range of town outlined on the night sky. The 
smoke of day has cleared from the harbor now. 
The everlasting toot of whistles is almost stilled, 



THE HARBOR 113 

save when a belated ferry-boat draws out of her 
slip or a tug labors past with a barge of freight- 
cars. The black water tosses cool and mysteri- 
ously deep, and when a puff of breeze comes over 
it from the city the sudden smell of street dust is 
revolting. There, where the long liners sleep be- 
side their iron piers, nosing their prows close up 
to the first lamps on the shore which twinkle 
away in endless perspective down the cross 
streets, is the end of the ocean road. Behind lies 
the harbor; in front lies the inland river; and 
between the pleasant country whence the river 
comes and the wind-swept waters whither the 
great ships go sits the city, monstrous, stifling, 
strong and metallic, and asks its toll of country- 
side and sea. It asks its toll of us as well, on 
such a night as this, when we too finally leave the 
excursion boat and are swallowed up within its 
walls — its toll of sadness and unsatisfied desire. 
Northward, under the Palisades, the glimmering 
Hudson melts into the dark. Southward, wash- 
ing the base of the mortared mountains, the har- 
bor opens like a gateway of escape. A final glance 
from the pier before we turn into the choking 



H4 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

streets, a final breath of its salt odor — and then 
the closing of the prison gates ! 

But, after all, the harbor has borne us for a 
time on its bosom into another world, and whis- 
pered, if all too briefly, of the strangeness of the 
sea. Even as it brings the commerce to our gates, 
it lifts our spirits beyond the clutch of commerce. 
It ministers at once to utility and to beauty. This 
the harbor will ever do so long as man goes down 
to the sea in ships. 




' 






WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 
AM not a naturalist. I tell myself I have 
never had time to become a naturalist, 
though perhaps the truth is I have never had the 
patience. I do not consider a man or woman a 
naturalist who goes hopping about the woods and 
fields around a summer resort, armed with a 
" Baby Pathfinder to the Birds," and on sighting 
a feathered songster on a bough consults the book 
and exclaims, "Oh, see the Wilson — or is it a 
hermit?" Personally, I should prefer not to know 
the birds at all rather than to know them through 
a Baedeker. What little I do know of birds and 
wild things I learned as a country boy, as I 



n6 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

learned to whittle a stick, to skate, to set traps, 
to find my way home through the woods at night. 
I like to fancy that I love them thus, not as the 
pseudo-naturalist, but as one who hears in their 
call the call of an earlier, untroubled morning, 
the whisper of half- forgotten things. In this 
great, crowded, treeless city of New York, 
swarming with its four millions of human prison- 
ers, the hints of the wilderness which I seek or 
stumble upon are at once a pleasure and a pain; 
they speak to me of a life far different from this 
we live on Manhattan Island and call " civiliza- 
tion " ; and to be reminded of that other life is 
both to dream happy dreams and to feel the pangs 
of restlessness and discontent. I do not need to 
wait for the smell of April grass in Central Park 
to give me woodland fever. Did not a hermit 
thrush spend yesterday in the ailantus tree in a 
certain back yard near Washington Square ? 

He was, I suppose, on his way north to Fran- 
conia, there to fill the June twilights with melody 
on the fir-clad slopes of Lafayette or Cannon. I 
wondered why he did not go up through the Jer- 
sey hills and strike across the Hudson farther 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 117 

north. Perhaps he pined, as some hermits have 
done before him, for just one fling at the gay me- 
tropolis ! At any rate, there he was, in his plain 
country suit, sitting very quiet all day. He did 
not sing. I prayed at twilight that he would, but 
his voice was silent. He was still sitting there 
when night came on, but with morning he had 
gone. 

This back yard, which is in an old residence 
section of town near Washington Square, now 
rapidly giving way to sweat-shops and commerce, 
is no larger than a pocket-handkerchief. The 
ailantus tree is half — or two-thirds — dead. So 
are the spindly trees in the other back yards up 
and down the block. Two or three doors away 
an Italian table d'hote restaurant, where they 
serve spaghetti and red ink for forty-five cents, 
sets out tables in summer beneath the stars, and 
you can hear the chatter of voices at night and see 
the lamps. Yet in all the poor spindly trees along 
the block during the migration seasons there are 
visitors from the greener world, even from the 
wildwoods — friendly chickadees, robins, and 
myrtle warblers being, perhaps, the most com- 



n8 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

mon. I have seen chewinks, too ; but more often 
they are in the open spaces of the parks and 
squares. Sometimes there is a junco. The other 
day one rode to Staten Island on a ferry-boat. 
He was on his way somewhere, had stopped off 
for a bit of sightseeing, and was getting a free 
ride out of town. And of course I am always 
looking again for my hermit thrush. 

When I was a boy, I had to go out in the yarci 
after my shoes every summer morning, because 
at exactly five minutes past three a whip-poor- 
will used to perch on the oak close to my window 
and call insistently — so insistently that he woke 
me up, which in those days was something of a 
feat. He was so close that I could hear the 
throaty gurgle in his call. Every night I threw 
my shoes at him. But I never hit him. I am glad 
now, for I long ago forgave him, and the call of 
a whip-poor-will to me to-day is irresistibly ap- 
pealing, fraught with the sweet, sad memories of 
youth. This call I cannot hear on Broadway, but 
I have once or twice on a June night, in a rare 
moment of comparative stillness, heard the queru- 
lous note of the night-hawk, first cousin to the 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 119 

whip-poor-will. The naturalists tell us that the 
night-hawks nest on top of the Manhattan sky- 
scrapers. Be that as it may, their call sometimes 
drifts down past Trinity spire — to some ears a 
sweeter chime. 

You have only to cross the rivers on any ferry- 
boat to see the gulls swooping and sailing, beauti- 
ful miniature monoplanes. But did you ever see 
an eagle in New York, except in a cage or on a 
gold piece? Or did you ever see a heron, or a 
screech-owl, or a turkey-buzzard? Did you ever 
meet a fox, except on business, or a white-tailed 
deer ? Or, at twilight, when his brown fur looks 
black and the white streak from his chin down 
between his forelegs tells prominently, did you 
ever see the sharp muzzle of a mink, wet and 
shiny, thrust cautiously up over the bank of a 
stream, and the sharp eyes dart about seeking 
food — or danger ? Probably you have not. Yet 
all these things have been seen within the boun- 
daries of the largest and most densely populated 
city on the Western Hemisphere — not in the 
remote past, but in the crowded present. 

The mink, indeed, are the greatest menace to 



120 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the wild fowl kept in the Bronx Park. The little 
Bronx River comes down from historic White 
Plains, enters Bronx Park at the northern end, 
near the Botanical Gardens, where it winds along 
in the swampy leaf-mould at the base of the hem- 
lock grove, for all the world as if it were in the 
wilderness (save for the paths cut here and there 
on the bank), goes out of the park at the south- 
ern end, over a dam, meets the tide in the village 
of West Farms, and finally finds its way into 
Long Island Sound through the great salt 
marshes that sweep up to the green pasture that 
was once the Westchester Golf Club course, close 
to Westchester Avenue and the railway. Those 
salt marshes, by the way, are dotted with tiny 
rock islands, plumed with scrub-oak, safe nesting- 
places for the birds; and in the old days of the 
golf club a brassey shot in spring ten feet off the 
fairway took you into veritable beds of violets 
and anemones. The violets are still there, but 
there is no more golf. 

Both up and down the Bronx River, which is 
not the cleanest stream in the world, swim the 
mink. Probably the fishing is n't good; certainly 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 121 

their favorite trout are not plentiful! But the 
mink will eat anything, and nice, tender wild 
fowl, fattened by feeding in the Zoo, are not to 
be scorned by mink or man. So the mink centre 
in upon the swampy stretches of the stream bor- 
dering the Zoo and the hemlock forest. I dare 
say a careful investigation of the banks, espe- 
cially northward into Westchester County, would 
disclose their abiding-places. But the task is not 
a fragrant one. At any rate, they come to the 
Bronx Park by night, and sometimes wipe out 
whole families of wild fowl before morning. 
Once one of them killed an entire flock of gulls, 
six or seven in number, which were sleeping care- 
lessly on a miniature sand-bar jutting into the 
park lake, after their fashion, heedful only of 
hunters. But, possibly, to make a meal for a 
mink is no less ignominious an end than to make 
a wing for a milliner. The mink's track in the 
snow is unmistakable, because he digs in his 
claws so decisively. After a light fall, sifted 
down through the Bronx hemlocks upon the 
frozen leaf-mould, you may track him to the 
stream's edge, and find, perhaps, tell-tale feathers 



122 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

by the way. But it is doubtful if you will ever 
see his sleek, cautious muzzle nose up over the 
bank. He is the fox of the water. He plays the 
craft of the wilderness in the heart of town. He 
dares danger because he has such an uncannily 
clever faculty of dodging it. 

Only a year or two ago a red fox was seen in 
New York City, not once but several times. He 
was seen by an artist who had a little studio shack 
on the wooded hillside sloping toward the Harlem 
River at University Heights near the Hall of 
Fame. Perhaps the fox wished to ascertain if 
Poe's name had yet been placed in that gallery! 
He evidently came down from Van Cortlandt 
Park, and was observed several times at day- 
break loping along toward the river. Possibly he 
was quite safe, for New Yorkers, even when they 
are out of bed at five in the morning, are not, as 
a rule, armed for fox-hunting. But why he had 
wandered thus far into civilization is a mystery. 

If you will go up to the Bronx Park Zoo early 
in the morning, before the sun is up (which you 
probably won't!), you may see herons walking 
over the top of the great flying-cage, with some- 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 123 

thing comically akin to envy in their rustic strut. 
It is exactly as if the poor wild things envied their 
cousins in captivity, just as the countryman, in 
the freedom of his fields, envies his city fellow, 
cooped up in a flat with a big salary to keep him 
superficially contented. And once in a while an 
early riser in the Bronx may see a black speck 
circling overhead and winding down the aerial 
spiral till it discloses the wing-spread of an eagle. 
A white-headed eagle actually spent some time, 
two seasons ago, in a tree close to the cage of his 
captive brothers in the Zoo. By what instinct he 
detected their presence from on high, or from 
what impulse he descended to their side, I am not 
naturalist enough to say. Presently he soared 
away again into the wilderness. 

In that beautiful forest of hemlocks (there 
used to be chestnuts, too, but they have died) 
which stretches through the Bronx Park, doubly 
beautiful in winter when the paths are obliterated 
and the trail of man can be forgotten by a few 
strides from the roadway, a European fallow 
deer lived in a wild state for two winters. Origi- 
nally seventeen escaped from the Zoo. All but 



124 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

two were caught. But these two were clever, 
and eluded capture until nature had taken its 
course. The buck and the fawn were ultimately 
killed, but the doe continued to live at liberty for 
at least two winters. A friend of mine once met 
her almost face to face. To come upon a wild 
deer in the woods not ten minutes' walk from the 
Subway is something of an adventure ! 

But other deer have been met in New York 
which had not escaped from the Zoo. One of 
them, indeed, a whitetail or Virginia deer, es- 
caped into it. He was caught swimming the 
Hudson River, and if a tug had not fished him 
out of midstream he would have landed, undoubt- 
edly, on Manhattan Island. He must have wan- 
dered, it is supposed, from the north Jersey moun- 
tains to the edge of the Palisades. There he 
looked across at that strange spectacle of piled-up 
buildings, railways on stilts, jewelled lights and 
plumes of smoke — and started over to investi- 
gate! Another whitetail deer was captured in 
Yonkers, close to the New York line, as he was 
heading for Van Cortlandt Park. Once in the 
park, he might well have startled some golfer 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 125 

going down to the spring for a drink, by crashing 
away through the swamp. 

To me there has always been something quaint 
and touching about the fishermen of New York 
— I do not mean the professional fishermen, nor 
those who go down the bay of a Sunday with 
more bottles than bait, but the old fellows who 
sit on the rocks in Washington Park and play, 
perhaps, that they are boys again, while they pull 
an occasional catfish out of the Hudson. These 
catfish used to be delicious, but I am told they 
now taste of oil, whether from the motor-boats or 
the refineries clown at Bayonne I cannot say. 
When you get off the Subway and clamber up the 
hill and down again to the old fort at Washing- 
ton Park, you put a high bank between you and 
the town. As you climb still farther down, you 
put piles of granite boulders and trees between 
you and every trace of road or path. You may 
sit behind one of those boulders at the water's 
edge and look across the great river to the solemn, 
wooded Palisades while the gulls swoop over- 
head, and fancy Manhattan Island is as it was 
when Henry Hudson nosed the Half Moon up 



126 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the stream. Across on those Palisades, within 
sight of New York, I saw a rattlesnake only a 
year ago! 

And presently one of the old fishermen will 
come to the next rock, unpack his tackle and per- 
haps a camp-stool, fill a pipe, and go soberly, 
patiently, to work. I don't object to these fisher- 
men in my solitude. Sometimes I rather long for 
a line myself. The occasional lovers are much 
more objectionable. 

You can get the fishermen without the lovers 
by going farther from City Hall and the Sub- 
way, down on the sand-dunes and marshes round 
Jamaica Bay. Here, between Brooklyn on the 
one hand and the summer city of Rockaway along 
the ocean- front on the other, are miles of winding 
tide creeks, shallow bays, brown marsh grasses, 
drifts of white sand. The wild ducks still are 
found here, though naturally in lesser numbers 
than farther east on the Long Island coast, and 
from the tumbledown shanties built on piles at 
the head of the hundreds of salt-water creeks 
boats put out on SaturHays and Sundays the year 
through, loaded with fishermen. It is a desolate 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 127 

area, lying flat under the dome of heaven, but 
lovely with green in summer, with brown and 
gold in autumn, and always with the blue of the 
sea water and the procession of the clouds. 
Though across it crawl black trains in the dis- 
tance, trailing rosy smoke at sunset, it is spa- 
cious, untamed, still given over to the sports of 
the chase. Yet it lies within the boundaries of 
New York City. 

An old gentleman who died only last winter 
used to describe to me with great gusto his first 
hunting expedition in New York. His father 
gave him a gun, and he went from his home in 
Greenwich Village, near the present Cunard 
Docks, over to the woods at the head of the 
Bowery, and shot a quail ! The head of the Bow- 
ery is now far " down town," miles south of the 
centre of population. But in those days Green- 
wich Village was connected with New York 
proper by stage-coach, and between were country 
estates. It seems quite inconceivable. Yet I to- 
day can leave my house near Washington Square 
after lunch, take a ferry-boat to Staten Island 
and a Richmond trolley there, walk a mile at the 



128 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

end of the line, stand in the woods out of sight of 
houses, and hear the guns crack out on the Fresh 
Kill marshes. Then I can come leisurely home 
and have plenty of time to dress for dinner. And 
I shall not have been outside the boundaries of 
New York City. 

The village of Richmond, Staten Island, still 
retains something of its old village charm, espe- 
cially when you look back upon it from the lane 
leading southwest along Richmond Creek. The 
old church-spire rises up amid the trees, out of 
its congregation of white tombstones, and about 
it cluster the houses. The lane runs along the 
southern slope of that great glacial moraine 
which divides the island like a spine. Cornfields 
border it, and in the fall apples grow temptingly 
to hand. Presently the moraine to the right 
comes to an end. So does the lane. The end of 
the mound is crested with chestnuts, and if you 
scramble up to them through a tangle of golden- 
rod and briers, you will find unexpectedly half a 
dozen neglected gravestones, a century old, clus- 
tered there. The red squirrels scamper among 
them. The salt wind comes in from the sea and 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 129 

drives the fog overhead. Last year a woodchuck 
burrowed just down the slope toward the woods. 
Once, as I climbed up, I saw the brown streak of 
a rabbit making off on the other side. It seems 
almost as if this tiny burial-plot were the last 
relic of settlers passed a hundred years ago, as 
if the wilderness were wiping out what they had 
accomplished. 

Just below this point, beyond a wall and a 
hedge of trees, is a cornfield. Last autumn, 
when I was there one misty Sunday afternoon, 
it was lovely with golden pumpkins between the 
shocks, and here and there a pile of purple cab- 
bage-heads. A shed was dimly visible off to the 
right, through the woods. No house was to be 
seen. To the left were the marshes, and beyond 
them more woods. It might have been the clear- 
ing of some pioneer. Not a human was in sight, 
but out on the marshes somewhere a gun was 
cracking. Once or twice both barrels spoke, 
which may have meant good hunting or poor 
shooting. You could almost fancy the settler, at 
any rate, coming home with his bag of game for 
supper. And this was New York City! 



130 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

There are many spots on Staten Island, indeed, 
which have so far escaped the suburbanization 
process as to retain something of their country 
charm, close as they are to City Hall. Near Sil- 
ver Lake are groves of chestnuts and beeches, 
with wonderful glades of goldenrod and wild 
flowers in the season. The birds are plentiful, 
and here the chickadee lives the year through. 
It must be confessed that in many of these places 
you are obliged to overlook (it cannot be for- 
given) a litter of lunch-boxes or bottles or papers 
before you can reach the exact spot where noth- 
ing objectionable obtrudes. It must be confessed, 
also, that, if you face a woodland vista south- 
ward, northward, should you turn, would be vis- 
ible some suburban " villa," or squatter's shanty, 
or factory chimney. But imagination may be as 
truly employed in not seeing things which exist as 
in inventing things out of the void. Face right, 
and forget the rest! That is my motto when I 
hunt the wilderness in New York. The practice 
brings me much comfort. 

Nor is the obtruding sign of civilization always 
unpleasant. I have spoken of the Bronx Creek 




Face right, and forget the rest ! That is my motto when I hunt the 
wilderness in New York. The practice brings me much comfort 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 131 

marshes where they creep up to the old Westches- 
ter Golf Club, and of the little rock islands which 
dot them. Before that golf club was abandoned 
to make way for tenements which have not yet 
materialized, I used to pick my way out to one of 
these islands, from grass hassock to grass has- 
sock, and, if it was in autumn, build a fire against 
the rocks. Sometimes I would spend hours there, 
absolutely unmolested. It was a grand place to 
work. But I fear I seldom worked. There was 
too much to see and enjoy. To the right, a half- 
mile away, across the river and the railway, the 
land rises up and is crested with tenement-houses, 
like a long wave, as far as you can see. That is 
the vanguard of town. The marshes stop it ab- 
ruptly. It hangs there perpetually suspended. 
In front the marshes, alive with waving, rustling 
grass and quicksilver pools, stretch level to the 
blue waters of the Sound. To the left is more 
marsh, and then a long green arm of land like a 
finger pushing out to the Sound. The prevalent 
wind, passing over the dry grass in autumn, gives 
the marshes the effect of hastening away from 
the oncoming town, fleeing before the invader. 



132 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

As my fire used to burn brightly against the rocks 
and I sat by it watching the marshes flee before 
the advance of civilization, I think I was closer to 
a sympathy and kinship with wild things and wild 
places than at almost any other time. I was un- 
doubtedly closer to the Subway ! 

The day is soon coming, however, when that 
wave-crest of tenements will break, flow over the 
Bronx River and the reclaimed marshes, and on 
to the very shore of the Sound. The day is soon 
coming, no doubt, when there will be apartment- 
houses in the sleepy old village of Richmond, and 
those forgotten graves on the end of the moraine 
will be violated to make a cellar hole. The day 
is certainly coming soon when the grove on the 
northern nose of Manhattan Island, with its an- 
cient tulip trees, will be cut down, and the last hint 
of how the island looked to Henry Hudson will 
have vanished. Fortunately, across the river the 
Palisa3es are going to be preserved in their sol- 
emn wooded dignity, and the hemlock forest in 
Bronx Park will long remain to remind us poor 
city dwellers of the cool green woods. 

But from year to year, almost from month to 



WILD LIFE IN NEW YORK 133 

month now, the spots in New York City grow 
fewer where I can seek out a glimpse to remind 
me of the wilderness or meet a winged or four- 
footed wild fellow to speak me the news. When 
I am entirely reduced to the captive creatures in 
the Zoo and to the park preserves, I fear I shall 
have to desert New York forever. The wilder- 
ness in captivity is but a sorry substitute for the 
real thing, even for my strayed hermit thrush in 
the dusty, half-dead ailantus tree down in the 
back yard. 





VIII 

WASHINGTON SQUARE: A 

MEDITATION 

S I sit here by my open window looking out 
over the tree-tops toward the west, the 
sound of a hurdy-gurdy floats up to me, detaching 
itself from the ceaseless rumble of traffic. The 
grinder is playing a waltz, I do not know what 
waltz — some cheap thing. But there is sadness 
in it, and there are memories. In college, in those 
days when one went about with his senses like a 
harp, ready to be struck musically by every light- 
est impression, something — a story of Coppee's 
perhaps, or just the sound itself floating into the 
Yard — gave the tune from a hurdy-gurdy power 
to make me drop my book and dream in a vague, 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 135 

delicious sadness. So now, on this spring after- 
noon, the sounds float up to me above the rumble 
of Washington Square, out of the heart of a 
titanic, hurrying, commercial city, and I drop all 
work to listen, plagued with the thoughts of other 
days, with girls' faces revolving past on shoul- 
ders that gleam, with the sound and scent of soft 
breakers on a beach, with all the silly, sweet 
memories of youth. 

And as I listen, the soun3 in some still way 
melts in with the warm breath of spring, trans- 
figuring my view over the tree-tops and the ugly 
roofs into a thing of beauty. I fall to wondering 
how we who dwell in New York can keep so blind 
an eye for what magic the town may hold of 
pleasant vista or strange loveliness flowering in 
its dusty ways. Not all can dwell, as I do, six 
stories up above a green oasis; but walks and 
parks are free, and that white fountain down 
there in its ring of yellow tulips holds a rainbow 
for every passer-by. Even now the sun is sinking 
lower toward the distant heights of Hoboken, and 
the rainbow must have formed. I shall go out 
to see 



136 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

As I reached the centre of the Square and sat 
down on a bench just west of the curve of asphalt 
around the fountain, which is roped off into a 
skating-rink for the children, the sun did shoot 
its rays between the fresh young green of the 
elms into the heart of the fountain spray. Breeze- 
blown from the south, the white spray danced and 
swayed, tossing cool drops over the ring of yellow 
tulips till a strip of curb glistened, and the ragged 
children ran with shrill cries through the minia- 
ture deluge, for all the world like the sparrows 
which darted through the edge of the fountain 
itself and winged up into the trees, their backs 
a-gleam. And in the swaying white mist, as if the 
heart of it held imprisoned light, the prismatic 
colors formed and dissolved and formed again, 
now into a perfect bow, now into glittering frag- 
ments of violet, green, and red. 

The spring hats this year are wonderful af- 
fairs — an acre sown with flowers. Beyond the 
fountain one of the green 'busses rolled by, its 
top loaded with sight-seers, and the hats of the 
women made it a gay garden in transit down the 
Avenue. The benches to right and left held a 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 137 

curious company — nurse-maids in neat attire, 
little mothers of the poor, sad wrecks of the 
under- world floated up to wait in the sun for the 
Bread Line, a young man richly dressed writing 
on his knee with a gold pencil (is it a sonnet to 
the fountain? I wondered). And everywhere, on 
walks and asphalt, the children swarmed, skat- 
ing, playing strange, half -remembered games 
with chalk-marks, shouting, falling down. 

I looked up. To the north, where the dusty 
vista of the Avenue began beneath the white arch, 
that perfect block of houses, red and sunny and 
comfortably homelike for all their dignity, laid 
its level cornice line against the blue sky. Else- 
where the high warehouses might close in about 
us — I saw my own gay Japanese curtains to the 
east fluttering not half-way up the height of the 
buildings that flank my abode — but to the north 
the Square remains other-worldly, domestic, de- 
cent, with ivy climbing up red walls to an even 
roof-line, and here and there a purple window- 
pane. The white arch, the sunny brick dwellings 
to left and right touched with ivy, the trees, the 
children, the roll of passing traffic, the gay gar- 



138 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

dens atop the 'busses, the warm May air con- 
quering even the omnipresent smell of dust — ■ 
all were centred about the white fountain spray, 
flashing prismatic colors in its ring of yellow 
tulips. So, suddenly I knew it for an opal set in 
gold, a great iridescent opal dropped by careless 
Beauty among our dusty city ways, and left to 
burn forever, so priceless and so cheap. I won- 
dered if the young man had been writing a son- 
net called " The Opal " with his gold pencil. It 
should be written with a gold pencil. But I did 
not ask him. In the bottom of my heart I mis- 
trusted that he was reckoning his margins 

And now I have come back here to my sixth- 
story windows, and the sun is setting. The sun 
sets every day across the river from New York 
with the same regularity it observes elsewhere. 
But we New Yorkers seldom see it. Something 
is always in the way. We seldom see the sky at 
all. I remember one winter evening coming out 
of the theatre with a friend, and walking home- 
ward down an ever more deserted Broadway. 
When we reached Union Square we were almost 
alone save for the passing cars. And he, feeling 




To the north, where the dusty vista of the Avenue began beneath the 
white arch, that perfect block of houses, red and sunny and com- 
fortably homelike for all their dignity, laid its level cornice line 
against the blue sky. See page ijy 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 139 

a presence, suddenly looked up. " By Jove ! " he 
exclaimed, " that si the moon up there ! " I like 
to come here at the noisy day's end, aware of my 
books in the dim corners and the spirit of Mozart 
in the piano, to sit by the window while the sun 
goes down over the dingy roofs, sometimes be- 
hind the Judson Memorial tower — that misses 
the graceful strength of its counterparts above 
the plains of Lombardy because the demands of 
city space forbade the gradation of apertures in- 
creasing in number, one a story, to the open 
arches of the bell-loft, dictating instead uniform 
rows of windows down the entire face; some- 
times behind the solid bulk of the distant Ap- 
praisers' Building; or, in winter, a near-by, tower- 
ing warehouse, all windows, so that the red sun 
pierces it clear through, making it a hollow shell 
of flame. It is surprising how the dreary same- 
ness of that expanse of roofs into the west is lost 
in the magic of the sunset ; how season by season, 
night by night, it changes, is transfigured, under 
the glory of cloud and light. 

I wonder if any Himalayas of this world are 
half so high, or hide behind their snow-capped 



HO BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

peaks a Thibet half so mystery-alluring, as the 
cloud-ranges of the sunset? Up into the blue 
they have piled to-night; range on range, white 
peak on peak ; and Hoboken is a city at their feet, 
the last trace of man before the leap into the snow 
and wonder. Quite real they are, so solidly 
banked and moulded into form by deep clefts and 
ravines of shadow. They are not clouds, but 
New Jersey gone suddenly mad for the stars. 
The sun sinks behind them now, and their tops 
take fire. Above them salmon streamers drift, 
and where the sun has dropped is a gulf of golden 
light. Between them and me each smoky house- 
top flies its steam-jet like a plume of rose. Dusk 
has gathered in the city streets. The toiling ants 
down there see nothing, and think of dinner. But 
beyond my plumed field of chimney-stacks, be- 
yond Hoboken fading into shadow, tower the 
Himalayas with peaks aflame, and my soul has 
gone forth to climb into the radiance, up, up above 
a gulf of gold, in quest of the sunken sun, the 
vision of that Promised Land no man shall cease 
to long for till he dies, his last steps pointing 
westward. 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 141 

I was startled finally by the brusque alarum 
of the telephone bell. When I returned to the 
window there was only a dull sky streaked 
with clouds. A police wagon was clanging 
through the Square. There was the smell of 
dust. I shall go to dinner — but alone, and to 
some quiet cafe where the barbaric custom of 
music does not prevail. I decline to gulp my 
roast to ragtime 

But as the sky itself refuses to make a prac- 
tice of showing off thus gaudily every day, so 
maturity holds for us no more affecting lesson 
than this : that the human soul cannot be quest- 
ing at all hours, and for its occasional outbreaks, 
its relapses into the " vagabond and unconfined," 
we must pay ever more dearly, as the years go 
on, in spent energy and sadness. I am paying to- 
night. I have come back from dinner and a call, 
and now I hear below me a band of Italians cross- 
ing the Square toward the south, singing in parts. 
The tune ought to be " Santa Lucia." But it 
is n't. It is " I 'm Afraid to Go Home in the 
Dark." That is a sign we are assimilating our 
foreign population ! I catch myself repeating the 



142 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

inane words. Incidents of my dinner, my call, 
pleasant recollections of a woman's voice, the 
rustle of her dress, her hand-shake, come back to 
me — but not the memory of my sunset this after- 
noon. I should like to dwell on it, sitting in the 
darkness to live again the kindled life of that 
hour. But it may not be. The glow has gone. I am 
just one other sleepy atom in five million living in 
layers in New York. I will go to bed — but first 
a long look at the dusk-filled tree-tops, the deep 
dome of the sky, and the cross that burns on the 
Judson tower, the watchful night-lamp of our 

Square 

All day the city has been painted on a Japanese 
screen, all my day, at any rate, which began as 
usual at noon. I sailed down the North River on 
a ferry-boat into a hazy south wind, and only the 
unforgettable and unmistakable height and ugli- 
ness of the Singer Tower reassured me we were 
not floating into a picture. When Man has n't 
himself 3one something in the night to change 
the Babylonic sky-line on the nose of Manhattan 
Island — erected a new forty-story building or 
two — Nature sees to it that the aspect of those 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 143 

mortared Alps is varied from day to day, from 
hour to hour. I have never seen them twice alike. 
And never before had I seen them at all as they 
were to-day, etherealized by the mist, monochro- 
matic, ghostlike. 

The sun was warm ; it had not been a cheerless 
day. Yet the pearly mists, felt rather than seen, 
blurred out the horizon-line till sky and harbor 
melted into each other on a level field of soft 
gray; a black ferry-boat or two, a white gull 
swooping, the only break on the first fold of the 
screen. Then to the left, on the next fold, the 
Battery began, and swept up higher and higher 
till the final panel was crowded to the top with 
huddled, soaring blocks of gray, outlines merely 
of titanic buildings a shade darker than the field 
of the screen, no windows visible save here and 
there where the sun reflected from an angle, no 
color save one green copper roof and the gay 
ripple of the Stars and Stripes high, high up on 
the Singer Tower, out of the haze against the 
blue. Fold by fold it was a perfect composition, 
massing, gradation, color, everything, Japanese, 
save the titanic suggestion. That, perhaps, would 



144 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

have staggered the little yellow workman, toiling 
with his silks and needle. 

To-night my own view, after the red sun-ball 
had sunk, was a picture of the Square by a Jap- 
anese artist, lovely, monochromatic, remote. 
Against a soft gray sky, tower and buildings 
stood up in sharp outline — it is curious how 
mist sometimes accentuates rather than blurs 
outlines — blocks of deeper gray. The steam 
plumes, laid level by the south wind, were white 
feathers tossed against a pearly background. 
And down below, the early lamps flared out be- 
tween the branches. They made the leaves that 
strange, unnatural green of stage-foliage. The 
whole scene became oddly unreal, a theatrical set- 
ting by a Japanese artist. But when I stepped 
back into the room, till the window framed only 
the soft gray sky above Hoboken, all but lost in 
the mist, and the gray tower and chimneys with 
their white feathers of steam, it was again a 
single-panel screen, a perfect panel, lovely, mono- 
chromatic, remote 

Much has been written in praise, more per- 
haps in derision, of the Alpine peaks that man 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 145 

has reared on the lower end of Manhattan Island. 
As they boom suddenly out of a fog at the voy- 
ager up the bay, too stupendous to be the work 
of our pigmy hands, Dantean, unbelievable, 
there is something terrific in their suggestion of 
material energy and power. They are a symbol 
of the nation, reared on its very threshold to awe 
the stranger at its gates. But, to the lover of 
classic form and sweet proportions, who is not 
so much impressed with material power as de- 
pressed with the sight of a building sixty feet 
square and seven hundred feet high, they may 
well be but a chaos of ugliness — yet chaos on so 
vast and Babylonic a scale that it has a kind of 
perverse impressiveness for all that ; by dark, in- 
deed, a ghostly splendor now, for the Singer 
Tower rears an illuminated shaft six hundred 
feet aloft and paints its spectral battlements upon 
the night. 

But this afternoon was a new effect, common 
enough among the high hills, and so doubly sug- 
gesting the kinship with nature of these steel and 
mortar Alps. The air has been heavy and dead 
all day, under lowering clouds, and the smoke- 



146 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

pall has gathered over us. I crossed on a ferry 
to observe the lower end of town, and found 
everything conspiring for the effect. A sea-turn 
had brought fog up the bay, which clung to the 
surface of the water and felt with lean, ghostly 
fingers about the feet and knees of the towering 
buildings. An unusual swarm of tugs on the 
New York side of the stream, vomiting soft-coal 
smoke, had hung a further curtain in the lower 
air, dark, impenetrable. The few low buildings 
on the waterfront were invisible. Invisible were 
the bases of the mortared mountains behind them. 
Marble, brick, or sandstone, they reared up 
twenty, thirty, forty stories out of the drifting 
mist and smoke, like peaks above the clouds. 
They were without base, without support, sus- 
pended in air. The effect was stupendous, the 
effect of limitless height like nothing so much as 
that gained from the summit of Mount Washing- 
ton when you look across the billows of a cloud 
ocean and see the cone of Adams like a dripping 
rock in the sea. I returned on the same ferry. 
As the boat neared the New York shore, and we 
slipped in under the curtain of fog and smoke to 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 147 

a view of the piers, the old buildings by the water- 
front, the L-station up a canon street, I felt like 
one waking from a dream who would fain have 
slept. And I battled in no pleasant temper with 
the swarm of homing commuters who impeded my 
passage from the boat — men and women who 
add figures and pound typewriters all day long 
up in those Alpine heights, save for an hour at 
noon, when they eat their lunches on the summits. 
A little later I fought my way through Fourth 
Street, again against a human stream, a mighty 
river of sweat-shop workers flowing into the 
East Side: the men unshaven, dirty; both men 
and girls pathetically undersized, foreign, bab- 
bling in a dozen tongues. When I broke into the 
open, the corner of the Square was alive with 
them, like a stirred ant-hill. They were all so 
small! When I inadvertently jostled one on the 
walk he gave way before me so easily! If I had 
put out my strength I could have tossed him into 
the street. A whole rush-line of them would be 
as paper to an American schoolboy full-back. 
Up here, from my sixth-story windows, however, 
I see nothing of them. I shut out the sound and 



148 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

vision of them. I wish I could forget as easily 
the horrid sense of physical weakness, amounting 
almost to disease, that came over me when that 
paste-white, unshaven buttonhole-maker fell 
away from the rude shove of my shoulder ! 

Midnight has passed. The wind has shifted 
into the west, and somewhere behind me, over 
that teeming East Side where the paste-white 
buttonhole-maker lives with six hundred thou- 
sand of his kind, the late moon has broken 
through the clouds. Southward, under sordid 
roofs, men and women are sleeping. North- 
ward, behind those red-brick, aristocratic fronts 
that line the Square, men and women are sleep- 
ing, too. Down in the Square on the benches, 
under the lamps and the vivid green leaves like 
stage foliage, more men are sleeping. No women 
are there, thank God — though last night one 
was huddled behind a column of the University 
building, directly below the motto, " Perstando 
et Prcestando Utilitati" — ironic commentary 
or demonstration, as you choose. Only the top of 
the arch is visible above the trees, gleaming 
white and lovely in the moonlight. Behind it, in 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 149 

the middle distance, like another, smaller moon, 
is the face of the illuminated clock in the Jeffer- 
son Market tower. An arc lamp flashes on the 
far heights of Hoboken, like a setting star. The 
Judson cross, the night-lamp of the Square, 
watches over all. I can hear the fountain splash- 
ing softly, and the rustle of the tree-tops. " In 
such a night as this " — the words come into my 
thoughts, almost to my lips, for Beauty has laid 
her spell upon the Square and made it the magic 
setting for immortal verse. 

And yet — those teeming tenements to the 
east, that paste-white, unshaven little man who 
fell away with sickening weakness before my 
shoulder ! 

The scene is no less lovely for the thought; 
Beauty walks with careless feet amid our dusty 
ways and scatters trophies of her spoil, be it the 
facade of a mansion or the gold of piled oranges 
on a pushcart against the dark of a foul-smelling 
tenement door. Yet who can look with untroubled 
eyes whom a thought has plagued? There are 
green vistas where no such thoughts be, and vir- 
gin hill-slopes under the moon. Great, restless, 



150 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

million-teeming, cruel city, closing remorselessly 
in about the green oasis of my Square, with its 
opal fountain in a ring of gold, beauty you have, 
but you wear it like a garment for your shame, a 
garment with many a rent and seam. If I have 
sought your beauty out, if I have tried to nurse it, 
to dwell with it, the instinct that prompted me has 
but grown with the practice, and yearns now for 
a fuller satisfaction, a less clouded joy. I look out 
over the moonlit Square, over the white, gleam- 
ing arch, to the lamp on the distant heights, and 
know that one day I shall dare defeat, shall dare 
to lay my burden of ambition down and strap on 
the wanderer's pack of dreams, for the call of 
freedom is in my ears, the memory of meadows 
daisy-starred is tugging at my heart. Fame, 
what is it? " Success is in the silences, though 
fame is in the song." A life well lost is better 
than a death well won. So, on that day when 
courage comes, I shall arise, with only one long 
backward look at this my Square, and pass to 
where beyond Hoboken there is peace ! 







IX 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 
HT HE State of Rhode Island is famed 
throughout the nation for Newport, high 
protectionists, and grasshopper- fed turkeys ; but 
for those who know Rhode Island intimately her 
true claim to glory is her Jonny Cake. Nor is her 
Jonny Cake, so different, even in spelling, from 
all other Jonny Cake, to be found everywhere in 
Rhode Island. There may be a few old families 
left in Newport who still have the meal ground 
in Newport County windmills. Mr. Grenville 
Vernon, who belongs to such an old family, has 
the audacity, indeed, to maintain that the only 
proper meal is thus ground in Newport County, 



152 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and not in South County at all ! It is difficult to 
account for some forms of mental perversity. 
But you will not find Jonny Cake on the tables 
of those marble villas which line the Cliff. (We 
make this statement without personal verifica- 
tion!) Northern Rhode Island knows it not, 
unless certain families there import the meal. 

Rhode Island Jonny Cake is made of Rhode 
Island white corn, which is grown in old South 
County, along the southern seaboard between 
Westerly and Pint Judy (to pronounce Point 
Judith in South County other than as half a 
quart and Punch's wife is to proclaim yourself, 
in the true Greek sense, a barbarian), and ground 
between soft granite millstones, slowly and ten- 
derly, till it emerges in flat, delicate, powdery 
flakes. It is like nothing else for ultimate deli- 
ciousness. It was famed before the Revolution, 
and it is still the most delectable article of food 
in the United States. 

Nor do we ask that this assertion be taken on 
our authority alone. Thomas R. Hazard, a na- 
tive of the Narragansett region and belonging 
to an honorable colonial family still known in 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 153 

Newport and New York, once wrote a book called 
" The Folk Lore of the Narragansett Country/' 
devoted ostensibly to disclosing how his great- 
grandfather's colored cook, Phillis, was the re- 
mote cause of the French Revolution and the 
death of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. This 
book first appeared in the form of weekly letters 
to the Providence Journal. The writer had not 
progressed a paragraph into his first paper be- 
fore a mention of Rhode Island Jonny Cake 
caused his mouth to water and switched him off 
into a parenthetical discussion of that ambrosial 
dish and other delights of South County, so that 
the parenthesis was not concluded and the reve- 
lation made regarding Phillis's share in the 
French Revolution, until four hundred pages of 
a book had been filled to the brim with Yankee 
reminiscence and humor of a tang and flavor that 
should rank the work high in the estimation of 
all who delight to browse down the by-ways of 
literature. 

" The Southern epicures," began " Shepherd 
Tom," as Mr. Hazard was called, " crack a good 
deal about hoe-cakes and hominy made from 



154 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

their white flint corn, the Pennsylvanians of their 
mush, the Boston folks of their Boston brown 
bread, whilst one Joel Barlow, of New Haven, 
or somewhere else in Connecticut, used to sing 
a long song in glorification of New England 
hasty pudding; but none of these reputed lux- 
uries are worthy of holding a candle to an old- 
fashioned Narragansett Jonny Cake made by an 
old-time Narragansett colored cook, from In- 
dian cornmeal raised on the southern coast of 
Rhode Island, the fabled Atlantis, where alone 
the soft, balmy breezes from the Gulf Stream 
ever fan the celestial plant in its growth, and im- 
part to the grain that genial softness, that tempt- 
ing fragrance and delicious flavor that caused 
the Greeks of old to bestow upon Narragansett 
cornmeal the name of Ambrosia, imagining it to 
be a food originally designed and set apart by the 
gods exclusively for their own delectation." 

It was more than a quarter of a century ago 
that Shepherd Tom wrote. Even then he be- 
moaned the introduction of " cook stoves." Your 
true Jonny Cake, he affirmed, should be baked on 
a red oak board taken from the head of a flour 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 155 

barrel, in front of an open fire made of green 
hardwood. The batter should be sprinkled with 
golden cream to prevent scorching, and the board 
propped up with a flatiron. Indeed, he declared, 
red oak flour barrel tops and flatirons were first 
used in the cooking of Jonny Cake, and only later 
put to more humble secondary uses. 

But a very passable Jonny Cake may still be 
made on a " cook stove," always providing that 
you have real Narragansett cornmeal, properly 
ground, and the right recipe (which we do not 
for an instant intend to disclose). That is the 
way most of them are made in South County to- 
day, perhaps for one reason because red oak is 
too valuable a wood to be used in flour barrel tops 
any more. So much of modernity we must admit 
in South County. We must admit, too, that the 
old Boston Post Road is now macadamized and 
over it whirl in steady procession the motor-cars 
between New York and Narragansett Pier and 
Newport. 

The King Tom farm is now an elaborate coun- 
try estate. But the Indian names remain for 
every pond and stream, names beautiful to the 



156 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ear if difficult to the eye — Quonochontaug, 
Watchaug, Matoonoc, Shumunkanug, Pasquiset, 
Pawcatuck — and the Indian graves are still 
green on Indian Burying Hill, overlooking the 
great salt marshes and the sea. The swamps 
where the Narragansetts fled for cover are still 
well-nigh impenetrable save by the old Indian 
trails, and these trails are growing no easier to 
find with the passing of the years. Two feet off 
the Post Road, and your wheels sink half way 
to the hubs in sand. The motors are not invited 
to explore in South County ! 

And back in the scrub oak and pitch pines, 
where wild rhododendrons bloom and the dull 
red of the American holly berry glints in the sun 
— strange Southern flora in the heart of New 
England — you may still find, if you know where 
to look, the last of the Narragansetts — or so 
they call themselves, though the historians assure 
us that they are Ninigrets, in whose tribe the 
remnants of the Narragansetts were mergecl. 
King Tom Ninigret was their last king. He died 
during the Revolution. His sister, Esther, was 
crowned with great ceremony on a stone still pre- 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 157 

served on the King Tom farm, but her reign was 
brief. The Indians became wards of the state, 
and were kept on a reservation in the township 
of Charlestown. 

Here, on Quacom-paug Pond (" The Lake of 
the Great White Gull," known to the white men 
by the more practical name of School House 
Pond), was their schoolhouse, built, it is said, by 
the English Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel in Foreign Parts, and here was their coun- 
cil ring, and nearby their church. In 1885 the 
reservation was discontinued, and the three hun- 
dred and fifty Indians who remained were made 
citizens and granted in freehold such land as 
each had under cultivation. But Quacom-paug 
Pond is still preserved by men who love it and 
cherish its traditions, in all its beautiful wild- 
ness, and by its shores you may see the deer come 
down to drink. 

The Indians by 1885 were hardly distinguish- 
able as Indians, however. Intermarriage with 
the negroes, descendants of the slaves which 
abounded in South County during the gay colonial 
days of Rhode Island, had bred a race more Af ri- 



158 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

can than Indian. So they are to-day, and as you 
come across their clearings in the scrubby pines, 
only the fact that the cabin is surrounded by corn 
instead of cotton persuades you that you are in 
New England rather than the South. Once a 
year, to this day, however, these negroid Indians 
proclaim their ancestral pride and celebrate the 
glory of the Narragansetts. First they meet in 
their old stone church (which is closed the re- 
mainder of the year), built half a century ago 
on the site of the first Indian church erected in 
1750. The services are conducted by an Adven- 
tist, to whose faith the tribe was converted many 
years ago. 

After a day of celebration in an3 around this 
church, which would defy the efforts at discovery 
of any motorists passing not two miles away on 
the Post Road, the remnants of the tribe adjourn 
to Charlestown Beach for another day of picnick- 
ing and bathing. They come in carts and dilapi- 
dated buggies now, followed by ice cream ven- 
dors and curious summer boarders. Three cen- 
turies ago they came, it is said, to this same beach, 
on foot along the silent forest trails. Then they 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 159 

were red men. Now they are, to the casual ob- 
server, simply negroes. And their number is 
diminishing every year. But the blood of the 
ancient savages is in them, and perhaps nowhere 
else in eastern America is the present so closely 
stemmed back to the past as in South County on 
Narragansett reunion days. 

So much of antiquity South County holds, hid- 
den from casual observation in its swamps and 
woods and up back roads of forbidding sand, with 
grass between the wheel ruts. But even along 
the old Post Road and in the little hamlets by the 
shores of the salt ponds which make in from the 
open sea, you may meet of a morning an old man 
with a basket, a salty ancient mariner, and when 
you ask him whither he is bound, hear his quaint 
reply : 

" Deown ter the pond ter ketch a few oysters." 
These hamlets, punctuating the Post Road with 
a white steeple or tucked away on sandy side 
tracks which seem to the rushing motorist to lead 
nowhere but into the salt marshes, are often toned 
with age and the weathering of storms into a 
lovely gray. The little mill pond back of the gray 



i6o BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

mill where ambrosia is still ground for Jonny 
Cake is covered close with lily pads, like a green 
carpet flowered in white and gold. The miller 
grinds slowly. Shepherd Tom records one miller 
who used to put a bushel of corn in the hopper, 
walk two miles and court the widow Brown for 
an hour, and then walk back in time to catch the 
last of the meal trickling forth, and to refill the 
hopper. 

Such slow grinding is in part due to a desire 
for right meal. But in part, perhaps, it is due to 
the South County temperament, which in turn is 
undoubtedly due to the South County air and the 
vast spaces of marsh and salt pond and distant 
ocean and doming sky, within which hurry seems 
an impertinence to the Almighty. It may be the 
miller lives in that century-old little house near 
the mill, its gray shingles gay with honeysuckle 
vines, or it may be that is the home of some fol- 
lower of the sea, gray now and grizzled as his 
abode, weathered of skin, taciturn, but mentally 
alert. If he knows you — and likes you — he 
will talk. If he does n't you might as sensibly try 
to engage the Sphinx in conversation. 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 161 

It was Captain Burdick, he who could sail a 
boat at black midnight, without a star, across the 
salt pond and make an egg-shell landing at the 
pier, apparently by the sense of smell, since other 
guide there was none, who was moved to dis- 
course on horseback riding, when a natty couple, 
on docked and prancing bays, once strayed down 
the road from Narragansett Pier into the primi- 
tive life of the real South County. 

" I rode one o' them critters once," he said — 
" only once. First we went along under a 
free wind at abeout a fifteen-knot clip. We 
was headed sou'-sou'-west fer Quonochontaug, 
when the gol durn critter decided ter come 
abeout. So he put his tiller hard over an' 
come abeout. But I did n't. I stood right on to 
le'ward." 

Then the captain shifted his pipe to the other 
corner of his mouth, rubbed his rheumatic knee 
reminiscently, and let somebody else do the 
talking. 

It may be the captain is in some way related to 
old man Stebbins of Narragansett, since pretty 
nearly everybody who is anybody in South County 



162 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

is related to everybody else. Early in the last cen- 
tury old man Stebbins used to drop in for break- 
fast with Shepherd Tom's grandfather. Broiled 
eels were then, as they still are, one of South 
County's ambrosial dishes — yellow-breasted eels 
speared under the ice. In those heroic days the 
eels were served sizzling hot for breakfast. Old 
man Stebbins helped himself seventeen times 
from the gridiron, as it was passed from the fire 
around the table, " a steady smile playing over 
his features." After the seventeenth helping of 
eel had been disposed of, he looked Shepherd 
Tom's grandfather " blandly and steadily in the 
face," jerked his head sideways in the direction 
of the kitchen door, and remarked, " Them 's 
eels, them is." 

The old names persist in South County, like 
the old Jonny Cake, the weathered old houses, 
the old taciturn, dry wit, and the old occupation 
of oyster fishing. You will find the town of Ken- 
yon on the railroad, and a Kenyon now owns the 
King Tom farm. It was old Gardiner Kenyon 
who lived on Point Judith many, many years ago 
and died at the age of ninety. He had been in 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 163 

bed some days when he heard his wife tell a 
daughter to go for a doctor. 

" Don't bring a doctor into my room," he cried, 
" I have decided to die a natural death." 

It was Hazard Knowles who declared that one 
of his sons was " fit for nothing but a Member 
of Congress." The Perrys are still thick in the 
land, of the same stock as Oliver Hazard Perry, 
who was a Narragansett boy. You may find 
Perryville on the map, even though you may not 
detect it as you whiz through in your car. Nor 
have the ancient traits been changed, for all the 
whirl of motors along the dusty Post Road, and 
the groups of mushroom summer cottages along 
the distant beach. 

A few years ago Captain Tim's wife died. 
Shortly after he secured his Civil War pension 
from the government. And two months later 
he died himself. " Poor old captain," said the 
village, "just as he had everything to live 
for ! " 

A returning visitor asked the stage-driver 
what had become of his horse Dan, long a village 
institution. 



164 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

" Sold him two weeks ago to a liv'ry stable 
feller over to Kingstown," replied the stage 
driver. " Clang." 

The stage rolled on through the sand while a 
mile of scrub oak and pine was put behind. A 
small house appeared by the wayside, and the 
driver tossed the Westerly Sun into the front 
yard. The visitor was wise and waited. Pres- 
ently the driver spoke again, glancing up at the 
bright blue sky. 

" Hope they git thet paper 'fore it rains," he 
said. " Dan took sick a week ago. G'lang." 

To the ordinary observer his expression had 
not changed. One who knew him well might 
have detected the ghost of a twinkle in his eyes. 
He did not speak again till, cresting a hill, the 
great panorama of marsh and salt pond and blue 
ocean was spread before the gaze. Then he said, 
" Rain termorrow. G'lang." 

" How on earth do you know ? " asked the 
visitor, looking at the cloudless sky and the blue, 
clear-cut horizon. 

" Block Island 's too plain," said he. " G'lang." 

But certain of the ancient traits persist of a 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 165 

grimmer nature — tendencies to strange super- 
stitions, relics, it may well be, of the primitive 
beliefs of the Indians and negroes, grafted upon 
the credulous countryside back in the days when 
New England witchcraft was still a fresh 
memory, and not yet wiped out by modern 
enlightenment. 

In the first year of the twentieth century, in 
a small hamlet of South County, an old woman 
died and was buried. Scarcely had her body been 
put in the ground when a series of minor mis- 
fortunes befell. A cow cast her calf; a child had 
the measles; a fisherman's power dory slipped 
her moorings and w^s carried down the bay; a 
farmer's haystack mysteriously took fire, and so 
on through an easily imagined list. The people 
of the hamlet met in council and decided that the 
dead woman was a " vampire " and her soul was 
haunting the place and making the trouble. Just 
how the term vampire, which they freely used, 
applied, it is difficult to see. Perhaps investiga- 
tion could have traced its use back to some negro 
superstition of slavery days. At any rate, such 
was the term the villagers employed. 



i66 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

A committee was appointed who dug up the 
woman's body, cut out her heart and burned it, 
which was supposed to prevent further possibil- 
ities for mischief. This, of course, takes us 
directly back to the most primitive beliefs of the 
most primitive peoples. Probably, to many 
readers, the story will seem utterly incredible. 
Yet it is true, and its scene was Rhode Island in 
the twentieth century, and its actors were not 
savages but Anglo-Saxon farmer and fisher folk, 
living within easy range of Narragansett Pier 
and Newport. A famous scientist has recently 
asserted that a return of the belief in witchcraft 
is always possible, in the most enlightened na- 
tions. Here, surely, is data for his argument. 

We have spoken of the curiously Southern 
flora of the Narragansett region. This Southern 
character belongs, in some subtle way, to the air 
as well, and has its real influence on the lives and 
temperaments of those who dwell there. In 
colonial days the Narragansett Plantations, as 
South County was then called, like the Newport 
Plantations, was divided up into vast estates, and 
each overlord owned his slaves by the scores, even 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 167 

by the hundreds, living the gay, hospitable life 
of a Virginia planter, to the horror of Puritan 
Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Thomas 
Stanton " lordship " was four and a half miles 
long and two miles wide. The old Stanton house 
still stands by the road in Charlestown, a beauti- 
ful piece of colonial architecture, with white 
panelling within clear to the ceiling and fire- 
places to roar a royal welcome. 

On Boston Neck, five miles north of Narra- 
gansett Pier, what is left of the Rowland Robin- 
son house, built in 1746, may also be viewed, be- 
neath its giant willows. The old foundation 
stones show that the house was once one hundred 
and ten feet long, with a gigantic kitchen and 
outstanding negro quarters. Within, the old 
basswood staircase, deep-worn by many feet, is 
still the delight of architects, for its graceful 
balusters and exquisite drop ornaments. Over 
the dining-room fireplace is a faded, smoky paint- 
ing of a colonial deer hunt. 

But though this aristocratic plantation life of 
colonial days, so like the life in old Virginia, has 
passed from South County, leaving only a few 



168 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

mansions to whisper of its memory, the Gulf 
Stream still sets in toward this favored spot on 
the coast before passing finally out into the At- 
lantic, and to the cool freshness of the salt North- 
ern air is added an indefinable softness and lan- 
guor which cannot be found — or so we who love 
South County are firmly convinced — anywhere 
else on the north Atlantic seaboard. Why, in- 
deed, should the South County flora be Virginian 
if her climate is not Virginian, and her soil? 
Why should her colonial life have been Virgin- 
ian, instead of Puritan? South County is a para- 
dox, at once Yankee and not Yankee. 

If you approach it from the north, you feel 
a decided atmospheric change as you crest the 
ridges in the neighborhood of Exeter. On the 
coldest days of winter, when Boston and Provi- 
dence are shivering in zero weather and the icy 
blasts are howling around the Flatiron building 
in New York, you may walk through the pine 
woods of the Narragansett country without an 
overcoat, not because the mercury stands any 
higher there — or only a few degrees higher at 
most — but because there is a subtle difference 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 169 

in the quality of the atmosphere, a tempering 
softness. In summer, too, you may lie out in 
your boat on one of the salt ponds and watch a 
blue heron fishing, or the languid sails travelling 
down the horizon far out beyond the yellow line 
of the beach, without being conscious of the heat, 
without being conscious of much of anything, in 
fact, but earth and water and sky and the sweet 
delight of being alive. So one lies in a boat on 
Chesapeake Bay and hears as in a dream the 
chant of a negro fisherman, 

" Mary weep an* Martha moan, 
You better leave them chillun alone — " 

coming sweetly over the water. It seems almost 
as if South County had been torn by the Gulf 
Stream, soil and foliage alike, from the South- 
land and deposited upon alien New England. 

Geographically, South County is a part of the 
southern shore of Long Island rather than Con- 
necticut. Its sea-line, all the way from Westerly 
to Point Judith, is a narrow strip of yellow sand, 
sometimes not two hundred yards across, and 
dotted here and there by rows of summer cot- 



170 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

tages. Behind this protecting bar of sand the 
salt marshes stretch back inland for several miles, 
barren of trees, to the higher ground where the 
Post Road runs and what seems, beyond the Post 
Road, like a great level wave of the land rolling 
down to meet the sea and marsh. Alternating 
with these marshes, however, are blue salt ponds, 
— Quonochontaug, Ninigret, Green Hill, Trus- 
tom and Point Judith — kept salt by narrow in- 
lets through the sand-bar, but completely land- 
locked, shallow, and incomparable for small sail- 
ing craft and oyster beds. At the inland heads 
of these ponds are the South County villages and 
the Post Road. 

The mariners of South County are not deep- 
sea fishers but navigators of these inland waters, 
expert in oysters and eels. The shores of the 
ponds are broken by small promontories crowned 
with oak, bay bushes, and huckleberries, and the 
great marshes between are now and again check- 
ered with cornfields or squares of pasture, and 
adorned by ancient houses as gray as the gray 
stone walls about them, sitting solidly under the 
vast dome of sky, no less a part of nature 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 171 

than would be some giant boulder, hewn into 
symmetry. 

If you climb the low, wooded ridge which 
presses down from the north all along the Post 
Road, your southward view discloses to you the 
entire configuration of the shore. At your feet 
is the ribbon of the road, winding, perhaps, 
through a little village with its white steeple and 
gray grist mill. Beyond that is the great, level, 
golden-green plane of the marshes and the spark- 
ling water of the salt pond, dotted with sails. 
Four miles away you catch the yellow line of the 
sand-bar, laid as with a ruler from east to west, 
and beyond that the blue Atlantic, with Block 
Island like a faint mirage on the sky-line. Over 
this vast expanse of land and water domes the 
sky. It is a view incomparably spacious, consid- 
ering the slight elevation needed to attain it, 
and a view wherein the charm depends to an 
unusual extent upon the design, as it were, 
of the floor of the world, the broad yet intri- 
cate pattern of salt marshes and ponds and 
ribboning road. Always the soft salt air blows 
over it, and on the hill at your side the most 



172 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

tempting of huckleberries grow in hospitable 
profusion. 

But the charm of South County is not confined 
to the seaboard view and the salt water. Turn 
inland from your hilltop and you will find a 
cart-track, or perhaps only a path, winding into 
the pines and oaks. Follow this track a little 
way, and all sight of the sea is lost. You are in 
the deep woods. A mile, two miles, and you 
catch the glint of water through the foliage 
ahead. A few steps more, and you are on the 
shore of a fresh-water pond, which stretches out 
before you half a mile or so, and then, bending 
around a promontory, disappears into the silent 
mystery of the forest. There are no houses, no 
boats, no hint of man beyond the dim cart track 
at your feet. 

If you try to follow the woodeH shores in 
search of an outlet, you will, perhaps, sink into 
Narragansett swamp mud up to your waist, but 
you will find no outlet. The outlets are subter- 
ranean, and their termini are supposed to be those 
springs of crystal water which gush out of the 
banks of the salt pond two miles away. If, how- 




Four miles away you catch the yellow line of the sand-bar, laid as with 
a ruler from east to west, and beyond that the blue Atlantic, with 
Block Island like a faint mirage on the sky-line. See page jyi 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 173 

ever, you are wiser in woodcraft, or are familiar 
with the region, you may find a track around the 
pond on higher ground, a track along a glacial 
moraine, which looks as though it had been worn 
deep into the sand by the passing of countless 
feet long years ago. It is an old Indian trail. 
Follow it, and presently you may come upon a 
ring of stones — the old Narragansett Council 
Ring — and then upon a human habitation, the 
old Indian schoolhouse, converted into a forest 
lodge. 

If you enjoy the hospitality of that lodge, 
hospitality which includes incomparable Rhode 
Island Jonny Cakes baked by a negroid Indian 
woman who, as a girl, went to school in this same 
building, and thus enjoy the use of one of those 
green canoes so protectively colored that they 
are barely visible down against the wooded shore, 
you may steal up to windward at early morning 
on a deer and her fawns 3rinking at the end of 
the promontory, and see the white tails of the 
little fellows disappear into the woods, like the 
hindquarters of so many rabbits, when your 
camera clicks. 



174 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

You may wander, too, for miles through the 
woods and swamps, guided by almost invisible 
trails, coming upon still, black little rivers and 
unexpected clearings where the Indians live, the 
women hoeing the corn and tending the chickens, 
the men smoking luxuriously in the sun. But, 
for all your careful observation of the dim, criss- 
crossed trails and cart-tracks, you will remain in 
South County many a long day before you are 
certain that on the following morning you can 
go again to the cabin or the stream you visited 
the afternoon before. You start out hopefully 

— nay, confidently. You take the first turn to 
the right, then the second to the left, by the wild 
rhododendron bush, and walk a quarter of a mile 

— and find yourself in a swamp ! Then, as like 
as not, you consume the rest of the morning find- 
ing your way back. After such a trip, you under- 
stand better the difficulties our forefathers en- 
countered in subduing the Narragansett Indians. 
There are two infallible tests of a true acquaint- 
ance with South County — can you find your way 
through the swamp and forest from Wood River 
Junction to Cross's Mill, and can you mix and 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 175 

bake a Rhode Island Jonny Cake? If you can 
meet these tests, you have two accomplishments 
to be proud of. 

After a few days spent in the Narragansett 
pines, on the shore of a fresh-water lake, with 
only the occasional sight of a negroid Indian in 
his hidden clearing to remind you of human habi- 
tations, with deer in the brush and black bass in 
the pond, it is a curious sensation to walk south- 
ward but a scant two miles and suddenly to see 
burst upon your vision that great panorama of 
marsh and sea and sky, to see houses and ships, 
to smell the salt instead of the pines, and to hear, 
coming up the white Post Road at your feet, the 
honk, honk of a motor horn. 

The motor passes in a cloud of dust, its fat and 
over-dressed occupants bespeaking, even from 
your lightning view of them, cities and our twen- 
tieth century so-called civilization. You peer 
through your screen of huckleberry bushes at 
their cloudy wake, fast drifting over the stone 
wall and into the woods, driven by the balmy 
south wind, and it seems to you like the wraith of 
a dream. When it is quite gone you come clown 



176 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the hill, cross the road into the pasture beyond, 
and wander cross-lots to the little gray village. 
There is mail for you, and a nod of welcome 
from the hospitable post-mistress in the tiny post- 
office. The miller stands at the door of his old 
gray mill across the road. You can hear the rush 
of water over the wheel, coming from the lily- 
gemmed pond behind. The rumbling stones are 
grinding out white cornmeal, soft and flaky, for 
your future delectation. An old man strolls up 
the lane from the pier, a heavy basket on his arm. 
He has been ketchin' a few oysters. 

Down at the foot of that lane your boat is 
moored. The day is fine, the wind steady. The 
sunlight dances on the Salt Pond. You stroll 
down the lane, too languid and genial and well- 
content for hurry, take a drink from the spring 
under the willow of the nectar which always ac- 
companies the ambrosia of Rhode Island Jonny 
Cake, shake out your sail, fill your pipe anew, 
and slip out over the dancing Salt Pond. You 
fear no giant waves behind the far yellow line 
of the protecting sand-bar. You have only to 
feel the tiller pressing gently at your ribs, to 



IN OLD SOUTH COUNTY 177 

watch the blue herons on the shore, to see behind 
you the white steeple of the village against the 
wooded hills, around you the green, level marshes, 
before you the blue of the open sea, and over you 
the sky. 

Hurry and turmoil seem very far away, the 
rushing motor-car again a dream. You are in a 
quiet corner of the New England of the past, but 
a corner wind-kissed from the south, languid, 
warmer, more provocative of lazy dreaming. 
You are in old South County, and your cup of 
summer happiness is full, for even as the sun 
stands in the meridian, warning you it is noon, 
and you put your tiller hard over, there comes to 
your nostrils the scent of Jonny Cake cooking, 
three miles against the wind, and as your little 
craft takes the bone in her teeth and rips up the 
pond your mouth begins to water for the am- 
brosia of Olympus. 





X 

THE DISMAL SWAMP 

LL my life I have cherished a secret pas- 
sion to visit the Dismal Swamp of Vir- 
ginia. I have at last slaked my desire, and am 
burdened to speak of the experience, not because, 
like most satisfied desires, it has turned bitter in 
my mouth, but because it has n't ; because the 
Dismal Swamp, though it is n't dismal at all, is 
one of the most fascinating spots on the Atlantic 
seaboard and one of the most accessible relics 
of the wilderness left standing east of the 
Rockies. 

I cannot now remember where my desire to 
visit this supposedly mournful region first came 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 179 

from. I suspect in part it came from reading 
Tom Moore's poem about the Lake of the Dismal 
Swamp, and the maiden who paddled upon it her 
ghost canoe, and in part from reading Mrs. 
Stowe's " Dred." Over east of the North Read- 
ing road, toward Danvers, there used to be a 
swamp into which we youngsters penetrated for 
a mile or so, rinding high-bush blueberries, horn- 
pout pools and wet feet, but never getting to the 
farther side. It was terribly easy to lose your 
way in this swamp. You had to carry a compass. 
To be sure, nobody ever did lose his way in it, but 
that was because we were so wise in woodcraft! 
Coming home at night and lying on my little bed, 
this swamp grew into my dreams with all its mys- 
tery and its gloom and its terrors magnified, and 
became the Dismal Swamp, where I crept 
through its tangle to the weird and lonely lake 
where the lover had " hollowed a boat of the 
birchen bark," and I sometimes saw that strange 
apparition, or, at the very least, a fugitive slave 
pursued by bloodhounds. From that day, the 
words " Dismal Swamp " have been to me curi- 
ously fascinating and potent over my imagina- 



180 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

tion. In my heart I knew that some time I should 
stand in the swamp itself. 

Well, I have stood there at last and camped 
on the shore of its lake. I saw no apparition in 
" a boat of the birchen bark." Indeed, there 
being no birches in the swamp, the chances of it 
were somewhat diminished in advance. Less 
fortunate than " Porte Crayon," the American 
magazine illustrator who went into the swamp 
with his sketch-book in 1856, I saw no gigantic 
negro peering warily through the reeds, with a 
finger on the trigger of his rifle. I did not even 
see any water, outside of the lake and the canals. 
Although it was early May when my companion 
and I entered the swamp, and the spring of 1910 
was not a dry one, we could walk dry shod every- 
where that we attempted it. There were no mos- 
quitoes nor yellow flies to annoy us so early in the 
season. We saw no snakes. The air was warm 
and balmy by day, cool and soft by night. In- 
numerable birds sang in the wilderness about 
us. The prevalent northwest wind ruffled the 
dark waters of Lake Drummond, that silent pool 
in the heart of the unbroken forest, till they 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 181 

danced merrily. The days were one long delight, 
and the nights so still and deep as only he who 
has been in the wilderness can understand, while 
a little moon rode up out of the cypresses and 
turned to silver the white mist on the water. The 
Dismal Swamp remains to-day, in spite of the 
loggers and the attempts at agricultural recla- 
mation, much as it has been for a century. It 
has suffered, in popular estimation, from its asso- 
ciations. Intrinsically, it is the opposite of dis- 
mal ; it is a virgin paradise. 

The Dismal Swamp, like all the great swamps 
along the South Atlantic seaboard, was made by 
the elevation of the old sea-bottom. This sea- 
bottom was elevated in such a way that the new 
land could not drain properly for lack of slope 
and because of the retarding vegetation, and the 
vegetable deposit of centuries has laid over it a 
spongy soil, in some places so deep that you can 
thrust a stick down through this peat-like crust 
for eight or ten feet without striking solid bot- 
tom. On the western border of the swamp, from 
Suffolk, Va., down to Reddick's Store, N. C, the 
old coastline can be plainly seen, the swamp meet- 



182 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ing this " bench," as the geologists call it, as 
clearly as the sea meets the shore. It is called 
" the coast," in fact, by the swamp people. The 
swamp extends some thirty miles south from 
Deep Creek, Va., well down toward Albermarle 
Sound in North Carolina. It is from ten to 
twenty miles wide, and Lake Drummond is nearly 
in the centre of it, though north of the state 
boundary. At least five rivers rise in the swamp, 
but their sources cannot be detected. They ooze 
from somewhere under the surface of the marsh 
deposit. 

After the close of the Revolutionary War, 
George Washington organized a land company 
with the first object to reclaim the swamp for 
cultivation. From a point seven miles south of 
Suffolk, a canal was cut in to Lake Drummond, 
which is still known as the Washington Ditch. 
The swamp, however, was too extensive to be 
reclaimed by such small engineering feats as 
were then possible. In after years the canal was 
used for hauling out lumber, and the .company 
made a fortune. Toward the close of the eight- 
eenth century, a larger canal, fifty feet wide and 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 183 

deep enough to admit the coastline vessels of 
the day, was cut through the swamp, almost due 
north and south, from the Elizabeth River at 
Deep Creek to the Pasquotank River in North 
Carolina. This gave a continuous inside passage 
for ships from Norfolk, Va., to Albemarle Sound. 
A second canal, to feed this one, was cut in to 
Lake Drummond, which was dammed with a lock 
to store water in the dry season. As the mud 
and sand from the main canal was thrown up 
into high banks, it retarded the slight eastward 
drainage of the swamp, making the western por- 
tion more swampy, the eastern portion less so. 
As a result, for many miles to-day the land to 
the east of the canal is green with farms, dotted 
with houses and crossed by roads (such as they 
are), while fifty feet to the west, across the slug- 
gish ditch, rises the unbroken wall of the 
wilderness. 

In all, perhaps, a third of the original one 
thousand square miles of the swamp has been 
reclaimed, along its edges chiefly. But though 
the lumber men have been again and again into 
the remainder, it stands to-day a vast and, save 



184 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

by the waterways or logging roads, almost im- 
penetrable jungle of giant trees and rank under- 
growth, the home of wild animals, of deadly 
snakes, of birds and fish, and of exactly two hu- 
man beings. It was into this relic of the wilder- 
ness that we plunged, but a day's journey from 
New York. 

The air was raw and cold when we slipped 
down the North River past the towering sky- 
scrapers of Manhattan and looked with contempt 
upon the poor commuters crowded on the ferry- 
boats like cattle, going home after one more day 
of toil. We patted our khaki-clad legs with 
pharasaical satisfaction, and sniffed for the salt 
round Sandy Hook. We woke up the next 
morning in the balmy, soft air of Chesapeake 
Bay. At Norfolk we stocked up with provisions, 
tried in vain to buy a history of Virginia or even 
a decent map, and at three in the afternoon 
boarded a tiny steamer called the Nita, bound up 
the Dismal Swamp Canal. 

Two steamers ply daily from Norfolk up the 
canal. The Nita does not make the complete 
trip through, however. A larger boat goes to 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 185 

Elizabeth City, N. C These boats carry pas- 
sengers, mail and every sort of miscellaneous 
freight. They bring out the farm produce and 
carry in the equipment. They are extremely 
busy little craft, in their leisurely, southern 
way, with crews of innumerable negroes. We 
chugged along past the Navy Yard, up the wind- 
ing south branch of the Elizabeth River, where 
an endless procession of southern pines sol- 
emnly kept us company beyond the waving tide 
grasses on the banks, under a couple of railroad 
bridges (built for two tracks to indicate the spirit 
of hope which animates the South) and finally 
entered the canal at Deep Creek. 

Here they raised a drawbridge at our ap- 
proach, and we stopped beneath it, slung a gang- 
plank out into the dust of the road, and disem- 
barked a bag of oats and a woman with a baby. 
On the bridge-rail hung two young negresses, 
chewing tobacco and making bold eyes at the 
crew. The village of Deep Creek straggled off 
in a discouraged sort of way down its one white 
street. The captain (who also steered the boat 
and collected the fares) shouted for haste. But 



186 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

haste seemed foolish. We were entering another 
order. 

Passing through the northern locks of the 
canal, we met two schooners coming out loaded 
almost to water-line with clean-smelling cypress 
shingles. As the water foamed through the 
gates, it shone in the sun with every shade of 
burnt amber and brown — the strange, dark 
water of the Dismal Swamp colored, it is said, 
by the juniper and cypress roots. Then we 
headed south down the arrow-like path of the 
canal, which held ahead the mirrored reflection 
of the bramble-covered banks and the great trees 
growing beyond. We Had entered the Dismal 
Swamp! My companion, the artist, who even 
more than I had dreamed for years of this day, 
sat silent on a bag of fertilizer in the bow and 
pulled excitedly at his pipe. You have to be ex- 
cited to sit on a bag of fertilizer ! 

The banks of the canal are so high and so 
overgrown with verdure that even from the upper 
deck of the steamer you cannot see over them. 
However, to the east telegraph poles bespoke a 
road, and now and then the roof of a house was 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 187 

1 

visible, or the face of a negro child peering 
through the bushes. Every mile or two we drew 
up at an opening in the bank and slung out freight 
to the waiting negroes, who drove mules in little 
two- wheeled carts, without rein or bit, after the 
century-old custom of the swamp. Driving con- 
sists chiefly of language. Through the gaps, too, 
we could see farms stretching out, level as a 
Western prairie, reclaimed from the forest. But 
in the western bank there was never a break, nor 
any cessation in the steady, monotonous march 
of the vine-draped gums and cypresses or the 
darker ranks of the pines. 

Presently a thunder-shower came on. We had 
gone twenty-four miles from Norfolk. It was 
six o'clock, and rapidly growing dark. As the 
rain soaked down, we ran alongside of the " Cap'n 
Wallace place " and threw off the Cap'n's mail. 
Cap'n Wallace is the squire of the swamp. 
Years ago, the Wallace family reclaimed a square 
mile on the west bank by sinking a drain under 
the canal to carry off the water eastward, and 
now have a large and prosperous corn and hay 
plantation, dotted with negro cabins quite as if 



188 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the war had never been. A mile beyond the Wal- 
lace homestead is Lynch's Landing, where the 
lumber is loaded on schooners, and here we dis- 
embarked and prepared to spend the night, for it 
was impossible to get into Lake Drummond in 
the rain and darkness. We were driven east a 
mile, to the village of Wallaceton, little more than 
a lumber camp surrounding the great saw mill, 
where we secured an apology for supper at the 
" hotel " where the lumbermen are fed. Wal- 
laceton has a store, a church and a school. It 
also has the inevitable source of Saturday night 
inspiration, and only too many negroes and 
whites willing to be inspired. At supper we 
found a New Yorker who had been down there 
in the swamp a year — for Wallaceton is really in 
the swamp, on reclaimed land — searching for a 
process to prevent gum timber from warping. He 
drank up gossip of the city greedily, and inquired 
with special (and quite comprehensible) eager- 
ness for news of the famous restaurants. Nobody 
keeps a cow in Wallaceton, apparently. You 
drink condensed milk in your coffee and on your 
cereal. And the coffee ! — And the meat ! — 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 189 

However, this truly dismal feature was for- 
gotten the next morning when we rose into a 
new-washed world, shipped our stores aboard a 
motor-boat, and turned out of the main canal 
into the feeder which comes down from Lake 
Drummond. 

" Porte Crayon," when he entered the swamp 
in 1856, went in from Suffolk, on the other side. 
The Washington Ditch is much narrower than 
the feeder, so that the trees often meet above it; 
and " Porte Crayon's " motive power was fur- 
nished by two negroes, on a tow path of logs, 
while ours was furnished by gasoline. Other- 
wise, his description, written fifty-four years 
ago, in Harper's Magazine, fits perfectly to-day. 
The same great turkey-buzzarS sailed languidly 
on ahead. The same tall, slender reeds made a 
feathery hedge along the bank. The same wild 
profusion of " myrtle, green briar, bay and 
juniper hung over the black, narrow canal." 
The same hushed stillness, broken only by the 
calls of the birds (and, in our case, by the steady 
chug of the engine), stole over the senses and 
seemed to blot out all memory of the outer 



i 9 o BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

world. It was a glorious, dazzling morning. In 
the black stream ahead the great trees were mir- 
rored so clearly that image and object were of 
almost equal distinctness, and the perspective 
of the canal was like a long tube. We saw little 
into the swamp, for the flowering jungle on the 
banks; but over the jungle rose the gums and 
cypresses and pines and oaks and maples, twined 
with enormous creepers and bearing their pen- 
dent vines like hair. Across our path ahead 
flashed the red of a cardinal bird. A flicker was 
tapping off to the left ; a water-thrush greeted us 
from the bank. The Carolina wren uttered his 
pleasant call. The whole forest about us was 
musical. 

We penetrated up this magic waterway four 
miles, disembarked in shoal water at a rough 
landing, climbed the bank, and tugged our bag- 
gage along a path trodden through the high reeds 
a few hundred yards further, coming out into a 
little clearing. In this clearing was an unpainted, 
two-story cottage, a shed, a vegetable garden 
with fruit trees and grapes, the locks which reg- 
ulate the outflow from Lake Drummond and an 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 191 

extremely military tent. Sitting on the lock gate, 
clad in the shirt and trousers of the U. S. Navy, 
was a young sailor shooting snapping-turtles 
with a Krag-Jorgensen rifle! As the Krag rifle 
is sighted to two thousand yards and will kill at 
three miles, there was something incongruous in 
his appearance. 

" Why don't you use it on a bear? " asked my 
companion. 

The sailor ejected his shell. " Bring on your 
bear," he replied. 

There seemed to be no adequate rejoinder, so 
we moved on to the house. This house is occu- 
pied by Cap'n Jack, keeper of the locks. Cap'n 
Jack has a telephone, and when they want more 
water in the canal you hear the imperative tinkle 
of its bell here in the silence of the wilderness. 
Cap'n Jack belongs to the " swamp folk," as he 
will tell you. He was born on the margin of the 
swamp, at Deep Creek, and has always lived in 
its shadow. Before the Civil War, when he was a 
small boy, he can remember dark nights when his 
father, a strong Union sympathizer, stole into 
the swamp with provisions for the fugitive 



192 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

slaves. Cap'n Jack himself wanted, when the 
war came, to go with the other boys to the front, 
but his family prevented. He will tell you how 
a Union troop galloped into the yard one day and 
took away the gun he had concealed. He can 
neither read nor write, and his cabin in the forest 
is not palatial to say the least. But he welcomes 
you to it with a native hospitality that might 
belong to the ancient regime, and hobbles behind 
you solicitously (Cap'n Jack has " rheumatics "), 
beating off his too hospitable dogs, and calling 
out for Aunt Jane, his ancient housekeeper, to 
give the strangers whatever they want, "yass, 
sir!" 

The tent, we found, belonged to a party of 
young sailors on shore leave from the Ports- 
mouth Navy Yard. We had planned to camp on 
the captain's clearing, but as they had the only 
available site, the captain insisted on our sleep- 
ing in an upper chamber of his house, where a 
feather-bed, long disused, spread a dusty and 
ciubious welcome. Aunt Jane, he apologetically 
said, was n't able to cook for us, but we could use 
her stove. Under the circumstances — the cir- 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 193 

cumstances being Aunt Jane's kitchen! — we 
were not displeased with this arrangement, and 
we passed our nights for the most part under a 
roof, eating breakfast and our night meal, of our 
own preparation, on the veranda. 

The captain keeps several flat-boats and a long 
canoe, dug out of a cypress log, which he rents 
to hunters and fishermen. Half an hour after 
our arrival we were paddling on up the canal, 
under the dark shadows of overarching trees. 
After perhaps an eighth of a mile we saw open 
water ahead. We dug in our paddles. The boat 
shot over the black, silent water, and suddenly 
emerged from the wall of the forest into the Lake 
of the Dismal Swamp. Our efforts ceased ab- 
ruptly. In silence, in astonishment, even in awe, 
we gazed at the scene before us, at the realiza- 
tion of our dream. 

This portal to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp 
is like nothing else. The lake itself, though the 
gazetteers of a half century ago, and even " Porte 
Crayon," give its width as seven miles, is a round 
bowl in the forest not more than three miles 
across. This distance, however, partly from the 



194 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

character of the shore, which has no distinguish- 
ing marks whatever to guide the eye or assist the 
judgment, partly from the curious greenish haze 
of the farther banks, is oddly deceptive. The 
lake looks ten miles across, and the forest wall 
on the farther side seems like a level line of hills. 
Into this body of water, untroubled by any boat, 
ringed only by the eternal silences of the wilder- 
ness, your way leads between what first seem 
rows of bleached mastodons' bones, and out in 
the water, a hundred feet from shore, like twin 
lighthouses marking the channel, stand two sen- 
tinel bald cypresses, their gray, quick-tapering 
trunks reared on a wicker island of roots, their 
crooked limbs bearing a shred of green, delicate 
foliage. They suggest gargantuan reproduc- 
tions of those Japanese dwarf trees which come 
in tiny pots and seem to be a thousand years old. 
They are dead and white, and yet they are alive. 
They seem to intimate that the inroads of the 
water have left them, the last heroic survivors 
from the primeval forest, to fight it out alone. 
They are the most striking and the most haunt- 
ing feature of the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 195 

accentuating its strangeness, its desolation, its 
suggestion of untold centuries of silence, its wild 
charm. 

As we rowed out into the lake, we could see 
these huge cypress ruins growing in the water 
all along the shores, some of them quite dead, 
some of them still bearing umbrellas of delicate 
foliage. On the shore itself were the trunks 
of many more, some felled by the wind, but the 
majority by the axes of lumbermen perhaps a 
century ago. And the entire shore, extending 
well out into the shallow water, is gray with the 
bleached cypress knees, looking as if it were 
strewn with the bones and tusks of prehistoric 
animals. The knees of the cypress are usually 
from two to four feet long. They grow up from 
the roots above the surface of the water, and 
have, apparently, been developed by the tree to 
secure air. By this device the bald cypress is 
enabled to grow in the water. Wherever a cy- 
press grows in water, whether this water is per- 
petually above the surface, or, as in the swamp 
woods, somewhat beneath the surface, the knees 
come up from the roots till they are clear of the 



196 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

water-line. According to Professor Shaler, the 
lake in reality has not risen and killed the cy- 
presses, but the forest has pushed them out into 
the lake, the vanguard of its advance. It is per- 
petually pushing its marshy deposit slowly out, 
and restricting the borders of Lake Drummond. 
The fact, however, that no new cypresses are 
coming up in the lake would seem to disprove 
him, and to indicate that when the level was 
raised by the dam a century ago too much water 
gradually killed these ancient and magnificent 
trees. 

For a long time we paddled our canoe in among 
these strange groves in the water, where the 
waves lapped through the tent-like roots and the 
bleached and weather-worn trunks whispered of 
untold antiquity. From a few hundred yanis out 
on the lake it was impossible to tell which trees 
marked the entrance to the canal, and there was 
no gap visible in the forest wall. We were alone 
in the wilderness. In spite of Professor Shaler's 
statement in his monograph on the Dismal 
Swamp (prepared for the U. S. Geological Sur- 
vey in 1888), that " bird life is only moderately 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 197 

abundant," we heard from the shore a perpetual 
symphony. Landing, we attempted to penetrate 
the forest wall. We squeezed through a hedge 
of ten-foot tall reeds, and under the shadows of 
the huge black gum trees nearly stepped on an 
oven-bird's nest, the mother hurrying off through 
the grasses with a pretended broken wing. Pro- 
fessor Shaler had told us that the bird life of the 
swamp was " characterized by the general ab- 
sence of the ground forms." He also said that 
" rodents are conspicuous by their absence," and 
we saw several squirrels. As we met no snakes, 
and found the ground under our feet perfectly 
dry, we lost all thought of dismalness. But the 
swamp jungle is quite difficult enough of passage 
without water. Giant tree-trunks block your 
path. The enormous blackberry vines, in white 
bloom during May, tear you viciously, and the 
cat briars are even worse. The innumerable 
bushes and creepers and tall reeds bewilder and 
obstruct. Up the straight trunks of the gums 
and maples huge vines twine, as thick as your leg, 
and their pendent foliage gives to the trees a 
feathery softness and beauty, shadowing every 



198 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

forest vista and rendering them bewilderingly 
similar. Without the sun or a compass for guide 
it would take an Indian to steer a course through 
the swamp. Only last spring a bear hunter, who 
had been familiar with the place from childhood, 
wandered lost for two days and nights, and was 
given up by his friends. It is no wonder the 
slaves fled to it before the war, and often eluded 
capture for years, even raising families in its 
jungleH maze. It is less wonder that the swamp 
is said to have held in years past hundreds of wild 
cattle, strayed from domestic flocks on the bor- 
ders, and existing without the supposedly imper- 
ative salt. These cattle were popularly believed 
to be ferocious beasts. Cap'n Wallace says he 
has heard the bulls fighting with bears at night, 
and once, at least, the body of a bull and the body 
of a bear were found lying side by side, mutually 
slaughtered. We saw none of these cattle (luring 
our stay in the swamp ; apparently they have all 
been killed. Tossums and raccoons were the ex- 
tent of our game. But many bears are killed in 
the swamp every year by the hunters, chiefly in 
November, when the leaves are off the trees and 




Giant tree-trunks block your path. See page igj 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 199 

the little blue gum-berries, which the bears love, 
are ripe. 

Rowing across the lake, we came upon an- 
other dug-out canoe, in among the cypress knees, 
so protectively colored that it was invisible two 
hundred yards away. It held a negro and two 
white boys, fishing for black bass. On the shore, 
which at this point attained the astonishing ele- 
vation of three feet, and so was crowned with 
pines, were two hunters' camps, roughly built 
and half hidden in the dense foliage. They were 
then unoccupied. Between them a brook trickleci 
down. We walked up this brook a few hundred 
feet, and came upon a merry picnic party of 
men, women and children, and a rough shack 
owned by a " swamp man," who will house you 
for twenty-five cents a day. This shack is at the 
locks which mark the end of the Washington 
Ditch. A second canal, known as the Jericho 
Ditch, also ends here. It, too, runs northwest to 
Suffolk, but is now impassable. The picnic 
party had come in from Suffolk by rowboat, up 
the Washington Ditch, a favorite outing for the 
inhabitants of that town. In a Virginia gaz- 



200 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

etteer published in Charleston in 1856, it is re- 
corded that " The Lake Drummond Hotel, a 
favorite public house," occupied this site, and had 
become " The Gretna Green of the region/ ' But 
it had disappeared when " Porte Crayon " was in 
the swamp. He records, however, that a visitor 
to it once poured the dark swamp water from a 
bottle, thinking it was brandy, and diluted it with 
white whiskey, taking that for water. The more 
water he used the stronger grew his drink, till 
he was at last saved by the entrance of the 
proprietor. The present shack bears little 
resemblance to " a favorite public house," but it 
affords a shelter, and during the spring and 
autumn is frequently occupied by hunters and 
campers. 

We paddled up the ditch which, it is said, was 
surveyed by Washington himself. More than 
a century of rank, luxurious verdure has com- 
pletely obliterated every sign of man in its con- 
struction. It seems a natural waterway. Being 
but fifteen feet wide, the great trees arch over it 
and trail their pendent vines and mosses in the 
still, hushed air. The sunlight sifts through in 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 201 

mottled patches, making jewels on the black 
water, which is so protected by the reeds along 
the bank that only the ripple of a boat seems 
ever to disturb it. For five miles or more it 
creeps through this almost tropic wilderness, 
silent, peaceful, beautiful beyond belief. 

That evening a young moon hung in the tree- 
tops over Lake Drummond and bathed with a 
silver glow the night mist steaming up from the 
water. The great cypress ruins out in the water 
rose like white phantoms above this mist, white 
phantoms of some prehistoric forest. The 
invisible water lapped eternally through their 
roots. The scene was poignantly lovely, yet 
lonely, too, with the soft f orgetfulness of a Lotus 
Land. 

In the morning we woke up to the carolling of 
myriad birds. To wake up in the Cap'n's little 
clearing in the swamp, where the great green 
wall of the forest seems perpetually in the act 
of pushing his cottage off into the ditch, and to 
lie drowsily while the morning sun rides above 
the cotton woods, while the fresh breeze waves 
the pendent hair of the black gums against the 



202 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

sky, while the birds' chorus shrills and pipes and 
calls from every side, to breathe the soft air and 
hear the green rustle of the forest, is a sensation 
of exquisite delight. The day was again cloud- 
less and pleasantly warm, though we had slept 
under two blankets and a quilt. The sailors were 
busy fishing or out tending their traps. Now and 
then we could hear the crack of a rifle. They had 
captured, alive, two raccoons and a 'possum, 
which they had caged up to carry back to the 
fleet. Like so many campers, they had wantonly 
killed innumerable birds and squirrels as well, 
and tacked the wings and tails over their tent 
door. They had also shot several cotton-mouthed 
moccasin snakes — the most deadly viper of the 
swamp, though it avoids you whenever possible, 
and Cap'n Jack says he never heard of anyone 
being bitten — and were preparing belts of the 
skins. 

We left them and plunged into the woods. 
The enormous blackberry thorns are no respec- 
ters of person or garment. They tear khaki as 
if it were cotton. But we crawled through and 
beat down our way to a huge maple tree, where 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 203 

a bunch of mistletoe as large as a bushel basket 
was growing far up, and managed to climb high 
enough to cut it down. The swamp abounds in 
mistletoe and holly, though the task of getting 
into the trees, or detecting the mistletoe amid the 
bewildering profusion of foliage and vines, when 
you do get there, is a hard one. The trees, too, 
growing so closely together, reach great heights 
before they put out any limbs, and their trunks 
are too thick for ordinary climbing. In the rich, 
green gloom of the woods the birds still kept us 
company. We counted in the space of a morning 
more than twenty varieties, including the rare 
water-thrush, the beautiful cardinal and the 
friendly and humble chickadee. Up in the moun- 
tains of Virginia you can sometimes meet sixty 
varieties in a tramp across a county. But we saw 
enough in the swamp to make us wonder at Pro- 
fessor Shaler's statement that bird life does not 
abound. The swamp is lyrical with birds from 
morning till night, at any rate in spring. No 
matter how occupied you are with some other 
interest, you can never quite lose consciousness 
of their presence, and sometimes the tapping of 



204 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the woodpecker rings like a distant woodman's 
axe on the hollow trunks of the cypresses. In 
winter, too, the open stretches of the canal are 
alive with ducks. 

As we rowed round the dark, shallow waters 
of Lake Drummond till we could at last tell by a 
sort of instinct where the canal emerged from 
the forest wall, and no longer had to follow the 
shore till we stumbled upon it; as we wandered 
long hours in the tangled and luxurious forest; 
as we listened of an evening to the quaint talk 
of the old Cap'n about swamp folk of the past 
and the days when bloodhounds followed the 
escaped slaves into this jungle; and then as we 
fell into deep sleep amid the cool hush of the 
wilderness, New York, if we spoke of it at all, 
seemed a thousand miles away. It was reported 
by Professor Shaler that by lowering the locks 
of the Dismal Swamp Canal and cutting trans- 
verse ditches, the whole area could be drained, 
and made to yield sixteen million dollars a year 
in agricultural produce. The lumber yield, he 
declared, is only one hundred thousand dol- 
lars a year, at most. But there are thou- 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 205 

sands upon thousands of square miles in the 
South still uncultivated which do not require 
costly drainage, and there is only one Dismal 
Swamp. A delegation from the Virginia legis- 
lature visited Lake Drummond last spring, in 
considering a scheme to set apart at least so much 
of the swamp as immediately surrounds the lake 
for a state reservation. This plan should surely 
be carried out. Except, perhaps, during three 
or at most four months in summer, the swamp 
around the lake is free from insects, from ma- 
laria, from infection of any sort. The scenery is 
wild and beautiful. The spot is rich in tradition, 
easily accessible from either side by waterways 
of alluring charm; and yet the forest stands 
to-day to all appearances as it has stood for cen- 
turies, a virgin wilderness. From its denseness 
it is unusually adapted for a game preserve, 
where bear and deer still abound. It is a para- 
dise of birds. The lake can easily be stocked 
with fish. It should be kept as it is to-day, for 
all time, a refuge anci a delight for the citizens 
of Virginia and for the nation. 

Our exit from the swamp was sudden and 



206 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

dramatic. Sickness called us out, and the ob- 
streperous telephone, tinkling incongruously in 
the wilderness to remind us of an outer world 
we wished to forget, suddenly reassumed it's 
beneficent importance. The Cap'n's two negro 
boys piled our luggage into the cypress-log 
canoe, which was fitted with oars, and with long, 
tireless stroke pulled us down the feeder to the 
main canal. It was late Saturday afternoon 
when we reached Wallaceton. Many of the citi- 
zens of that metropolis of the swamp were al- 
ready in a state of Sabbath cheer — not induced 
by the brown swamp water, concerning which 
they make no mistakes. Was there an automo- 
bile in the town? The question brought forth 
only apologies. Again the telephone came to our 
aid. We called up a garage in Portsmouth, 
twenty-five miles away. An hour and a quarter 
later the twin lamps of a motor-car shone through 
the gathering gloom of the village street. We 
hailed this incongruous symbol of civilization 
with joy, when a few hours before we would have 
cursed it, and, tumbling in, we began our exit 
from the swamp, not, as we had planned, once 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 207 

more by the slow, languid, other-wordly canal, 
as if we were drifting back into the days before 
the war, but with all the speed a bad road per- 
mitted, in a high-power motor-car. 

The road ran, evidently, several miles east of 
the canal, occasionally past farms where startled 
faces gazed at us from lamp-lit doors, but most 
of the time through a dim plain, where tall, 
ghostly reeds hedged the road in front, lit by the 
glare of our searchlights. This was the Green 
Sea, a part of the swamp so-called because, in the 
absence of trees, it is covered with waving bil- 
lows of reed and cane. But we went through 
woods, as well, where the searchlights pierced 
up into the gloom, throwing suddenly out of the 
shadow some gigantic trunk, while the ghostly 
lane of reeds ran ever on ahead. The car lurched 
through puddles and bumped over bridges. Once 
we flew past a farm where a garden party was 
in full swing, lanterns hanging from the trees, 
and the horses tethered by the fence reared at our 
approach. We finally crossed the canal at the 
village of Deep Creek, over the bridge which had 
been raised to let our boat pass through some 



208 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

days before, tore down the narrow village 
street where the white fence palings seemed al- 
most to graze our wheels, and settled down for 
the final run up a state road to the city. 

Once on this smooth macadam, the swamp be- 
came suddenly the thing unreal. It was behind 
us, gone, a memory. The purring motor-car, the 
city lamps that presently reddened the sky ahead, 
the scream of a distant train, commerce, haste, 
worry, the rush of modern life were the real 
things again. We paid the chauffeur (a colored 
man, who also owned the car) a ridiculously small 
fee, considering the distance and the state of the 
roads, and hastened on our journey by the ordi- 
nary carriers of commerce. 

That is not the ideal way to take leave of the 
Dismal Swamp, but it is not without its vivid 
suggestion of contrast. Life in the swamp is 
slow, simple, primitive; it still keeps its flavor 
of a vanished century, like the languid peace of 
its canal. The swamp itself is still, to all in- 
tents, a virgin wilderness. Yet we tore out of 
it in a motor-car. There are few rude spots left 
in America so easily accessible; and there is no 



THE DISMAL SWAMP 209 

spot more beautiful, more haunted with old asso- 
ciations, more musical with birds and strange 
with ancient cypresses and lovely with the spell 
of the trackless wilderness than the Lake of the 
Dismal Swamp. 




THE ABANDONED FARM 

AM sitting as I write in a sunny corner of 
the pasture behind our house. Though it 
is but the first week in September, we had a frost 
last night, and the sun is grateful. The potato 
plants are already brown, the fodder corn is with- 
ering, the leaves of the pumpkin vines are droop- 
ing round their stems. This early frost is a great 
blow to the farmers of our valley, one of their 
besetting discouragements. The valley stretches 
southward from where I sit ten miles to the great 
blue bulk of Moosilauke, which is beautifully 
framed through our barn door. The valley is 
walled on the east by three mountains, averag- 



THE ABANDONED FARM 211 

ing four thousand feet in height and springing 
directly up from the farms. Indeed, the pastures 
eat their green way up the slopes into the timber. 
These three great hills have been lumbered in 
times past, but by the grace of Heaven — it was 
no fault of the lumbermen — the fire did not 
follow, nor the destructive landslide. They are 
once more going back to their dark, billowy green 
of spruce and hemlock. Across the level 
meadows at the valley bottom, beyond the elms 
which fringe the little river, the Ham Branch, 
rises a parallel wall of much lower hills, velvety 
with upland farms or timbered with second growth 
where the white birches gleam in the trailing 
shadow of a cloud. I am perched high enough 
in the pasture to see, both north and south, the 
steady procession of farmhouses, a quarter of 
a mile apart, along the ribbon of the single 
road, each set like a gem in its acres of green 
mowing, its squares of corn, its pastures sloping 
up past picturesque sugar houses into the shaggy 
mountain timber. New Hampshire holds few 
views at once more rugged with frowning moun- 
tains and soft and intimate with pastoral charm. 



212 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

We are but four miles from a well-known vil- 
lage to the north and the fashionable summer 
hotels. As I look at the neat and prosperous 
farms nearby, I realize that their prosperity is 
largely due to this proximity. We are in the 
summer-boarder zone. To each one of these 
farms comes from one to three thousand dollars 
annually (in some cases more) of " city money." 
But southward, following the white ribbon of the 
road toward the wild northern shoulders of 
Moosilauke, as the town and the railroad recede 
the case becomes quite different. A mile, at most, 
and we have left the summer-boarder zone. The 
air of prosperity ceases; we seem first to step 
back into a more primitive community lingering 
on, and then into the ruins of a vanished com- 
munity. We step into the land of abandoned 
farms, into a half-wild, beautiful, pathetic 
desolation. 

Two or three miles up the roacl is the next vil- 
lage. There is a " general store " and post- 
office combined, close to the road, redolent with 
the mingled odor of calico, kerosene and chewing 
tobacco. Across the road is a tiny mill-pond 



THE ABANDONED FARM 213 

and mouse-gray sawmill, now seldom used. Be- 
yond the mill-pond rise the dark hemlocks, and 
over their spired tops looms the summit of a 
mountain. Here in the centre of the village are 
not more than ten houses, three of them boarded 
up and abandoned. Through the window-chinks 
of one you may see the crayon portraits still 
hanging on the walls and the crocheted tidies on 
the chairs. Just south of the mill-pond is a de- 
serted creamery, covered now with flaming 
posters announcing a new brand of tobacco and 
the county fair ; and just beyond that is the town 
hall. The brook flows under the town hall, and 
the lower story is the smithy. The hall is reached 
by an inclined plane, as if it had once been a car- 
riage shop. The unpainted walls of this quaint 
municipal building are also plastered with posters, 
and the forest trees brush its roof and tint the 
aged shingles a beautiful mossy green. Then the 
road winds up a hill and passes on toward 
Moosilauke. 

Soon the valley widens out. Side of the road, 
facing a tamarack swamp, is the white church, 
guiltless of spire, and guiltless of minister save 



214 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

for the Sunday afternoon visits of a pastor from 
the northern village. There are no houses near 
it now; it represents the ancient centre of popu- 
lation. But an eighth of a mile away an aban- 
doned farmhouse sits in the fields under the 
shadow of the sweeping wall of the mountain. 
Under the shadow of this wall, too, is the village 
cemetery, all the graves running east and west, 
no doubt in obedience to the old Calvinistic cus- 
tom, so that when the final trumpet sounds the 
occupants may rise facing the east and thus avoid 
confusion on that busy morning. Goldenrod 
and asters bloom amid the neglected stones. You 
look across the wild burial place to the tangle of 
the forest and as you lift your eyes they range 
up a spruce-clad slope, then over a rocky shoul- 
der, to the summit of the mountain, four thou- 
sand feet above you. Only the birds break the 
silence — in June the sweet fluting of the 
phoebies and in the mournful twilight the golden 
throb of the hermit thrushes. 

The road winds on now past scattered farms, 
some abandoned, some looking as if they would 
soon have to be, while the great shoulders of 




An abandoned farmhouse sits in the fields under the shadow of the 
sweeping wall of the mountain 



THE ABANDONED FARM 215 

Moosilauke begin to lose their blue and to show 
green forests or the horrid scars of the lumber- 
men. The valley narrows in again, grows wilder. 
After you have passed through the skirts of a 
logging village, crossed the Wild Ammonoosuc at 
the timber dam, and penetrated two miles into 
the ravine where the Benton trail goes up the 
mountain, you come suddenly out of the woods 
into a clearing, and set in that clearing amid 
golden, waving oats is a little house, silvery gray 
where its weathered boards show through the 
tangle of wild woodbine which has clambered 
over the black apertures of the windows, pulled 
the gutters half off, and twined triumphantly 
about the great chimney where the last sprig of 
it flies like a banner at the top. Behind this 
beautiful, lonely ruin rises the sheer wall of 
Moosilauke's northwestern shoulder, eight hun- 
dred feet of first growth hard timber, fortunately 
of no use for wood pulp and so spared, and then 
one thousand feet more of scarred and desolate 
and rain-washed slope — a pathetic testimony to 
the American passion for Sunday newspapers. 
Out of sight beyond the clearing is a tiny hospit- 



216 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

able hotel, used by the mountain climbers ; that is 
the secret of the growing oats. Southward from 
here the road enters the " tunnel " between Moosi- 
lauke and Clough, a forest way, and emerges 
into a more fertile land. But the last ruin in our 
valley is the most beautiful. A few more years, 
and the woodbine will have pulled it down, aided 
by the racking, rotting winter storms. The 
weeds will wave a few years longer yet in its 
cellar hole. Then nature will obliterate all traces 
of it; its memory will sleep with that of the 
mountain pioneer who hewed out its beams from 
the timber in his clearing. 

This lower end of our valley is but one of many 
in this northern region, spots where the myriad 
automobiles of the summer tourists never pene- 
trate, where the summer boarder has as yet 
failed to come as a salvation, and whence of the 
native population all but the aged or the inert 
have fled, yielding to the march of modern life 
and the changed demands of modern society. 

It is a fourteen-mile drive from our house, over 
a hill which might be called " Breakneck Hill " 
if there were not already a Breakneck Hill on the 



THE ABANDONED FARM 217 

Bethlehem road, to a village where you, Reader, 
though you may know your Bretton Woods, your 
Profile House, your North Conway and Jeffer- 
son, have never been and of which probably you 
have never heard. The motor-cars go through 
the Franconia Notch nowadays in a steady pro- 
cession. I have counted the license tags from 
twelve states on an August Saturday, while walk- 
ing from Profile to Echo Lake. But the motors 
never go to this forgotten village. There is noth- 
ing to go for, except one of the loveliest pros- 
pects in all New England and the melancholy 
charm of human habitations abandoned and laps- 
ing back to wilderness. 

The road thither takes you past a strange con- 
trast, in people and in epochs. On one side of the 
divide, the side still facing toward the summer 
resorts, there spreads to the right of the road a 
huge stock-farm, dotted with perfectly kept 
buildings and sleek, high-test cattle, the union 
under one hand of a score of farms. It is owned 
for summer amusement by a millionaire manu- 
facturer, but it is scientifically conducted, and for 
several seasons now has yielded an annual profit. 



218 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

To the left is a dilapidated house, with a more 
dilapidated barn, where lives an old man in the 
accumulated filth of seventy years. It is his 
boast, so they say, that he has not washed his 
face for ten years. His estimate seems conserva- 
tive. Lacking character, ambition, incentive of 
any sort, he ekes out a bare living from his 
scrubby clearing. Yet his case is not typical ; he 
is a miser; he has thousands of dollars in the 
bank. Once he owned great tracts of timber up 
the slope, and held on to them till their value rose. 
But it was too late then for him to learn how to 
live. He is one of those " characters " which our 
lonely countryside breeds — the loneliness and 
the constant intermarriage of relatives. When 
he dies, one more abandoned farmhouse will be 
added to the valley's toll. 

Over the divide, we are in a different land- 
scape. Looking back from the summit, we see 
the Franconia ranges piled up, with the rocky 
peak of Lafayette lording it over them, and far 
off the blue Presidentials. Once on the other 
side, the country rolls in doming billows of wood- 
land and pasture, without grandeur but with all 



THE ABANDONED FARM 219 

the soft charm of the Berkshire Hills. Instead, 
however, of the rich estates of Stockbridge and 
Lenox, the perpetual gardens and more or less 
beautiful houses, here there are, between half- 
mile stretches of second-growth timber where an 
abandoned stone wall shows through the glint of 
the birches, mute witness of fields once under 
cultivation, only the silver-gray ruins of farms 
and stables, their surrounding fields untilled, but 
still annually mowed by invisible hands. Some 
of the houses, indeed, are gone completely, save 
for a pile of bricks where the chimney stood and 
the ring of the foundation stones, half buried in 
fireweed and clematis. The barns have survived 
longer, for unseen hands have propped them 
up to hold the hay which is still reaped in 
the clearings. One I recall especially. Not 
even the foundations of the house are visible 
now, but the barn stands in the orchard, its great 
doors fallen down, its boards yawning widely, 
and through the vista of its brown, dead hay 
the lovely picture of gnarled apple-trees in 
the abandoned orchard, a gray stone wall, 
and then the green rolling country drop- 



220 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ping away to a far valley and the blue hills of 
Vermont. 

If you stand at a corner of this barn, beside a 
ruined sled-runner serving now as a trellis for 
tansy, raspberry vines and jewel-weed, you can 
look for some distance toward the southwest and 
count half a dozen other abandoned farmhouses 
or barns, like elephants browsing over the hills. 
Two are off the main road, up lanes now choked 
and impassable. One was the blacksmith's house, 
presumably, for in a cellar hole close by are the 
bellows-frame and the rusty forge. Between 
them the timber is growing back down the slopes, 
some of it the precious spruce, much of it sugar 
maple, but none of it, alas, the former glory of 
our northern woods, white pine ! 

As the road draws nearer the village, not all 
the houses are abandoned. One splendid old 
place, as square and dignified as the colonial 
farmhouses of the earlier and richer settlements 
of Massachusetts, like Deerfield or Concord, is 
now lapsing into decay; but farther on a little 
house, built with its wood-sheds and out-houses 
to form a carpenter's T-square, is gay with gera- 



THE ABANDONED FARM 221 

niums, golden-glow and tousled-headed, bare- 
footed, peering-eyed children. The road dips 
here through that marvel of to-day — a grove of 
first-growth pines — where you pause astonished 
in the hush of their cathedral aisles, and suddenly 
rises again to a prosperous farmhouse recently 
bought and reclaimed by an ambitious farmer 
from a neighboring town, who has for a trifling 
investment doubled his product. Then the road 
sweeps on into the most beautiful bit of landscape 
in New England, a statement none of my readers 
can well challenge, for none of them has seen it ! 
Cultivated fields, checkered with squares of 
mowing, barley and corn, slope to a rich, grassy 
intervale. Beyond the woods rise twin-hill sum- 
mits, dark with spruce; and exactly framed be- 
tween those dark-green hills is the whole blue 
bulk of Moosilauke — that and nothing else. 
The mountain looks down like the monarch he is 
into this pastoral intervale, and he suggests more 
potently than the sight of all the ranges could do, 
the piled-up splendors of those other peaks be- 
yond the divide. He himself, too, gains in bulk 
by the isolation; his blue flanks are tremendous 



222 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

over the corn and barley and the intimate meadow 
brook. 

Another climb of the road, and Moosilauke dis- 
appears once more behind the near hills. You 
are at the village cemetery, set upon a windy 
summit and commanding the lovely prospect of 
the now expanded intervale. This cemetery is 
neatness itself. Not a stone is broken, not a weed 
grows on the graves. Yet not a living creature 
passes, either. You wonder who keeps these 
graves so neat, as you wonder who cuts the hay 
upon the abandoned farms. The town is health- 
ful, too, for upon one stone you read of " The 
Widow Susanna Brownson, Born 1698, Died 

1801. 

" Her duty finished to Mankind, 
To God her spirit she resigned/' 

The Widow Brownson might almost have grown 
up to blush at the late Restoration comedy, gone 
through the Pope period, and died with a copy of 
" The Lyrical Ballads " in her hand ! It is, unfor- 
tunately, much more probable that she read only 
her Bible and The Old Farmer's Almanac — 
good reading, both, but hardly associated with 



THE ABANDONED FARM 223 

the re-birth of nature in English poetry. It is 
something, however, to have spanned a century. 
The letters on her stone are picked out with new 
gilt. The invisible spirits of this deserted village 
have kept her memory green. 

Beyond the cemetery, along the ridge of the 
hill, rises the village spire. The village is at the 
cross-roads. One road runs along the ridge, 
the other plunges over it and crosses the inter- 
vale like the smooth, straight drop of a great 
toboggan chute. A New Hampshire Gazetteer 
of 1850 says that there is a store and post-office. 
Doubtless there was in 1850, but no signs of the 
combination remain. At one of the four corners 
of the cross-roads is an inhabited house. At two 
corners are deserted houses — charming houses, 
too, with carved window-caps and colonial, pan- 
nelled doors. At the fourth corner is the dilapi- 
dated church and ruined horse-sheds. Up the 
road is a tiny schoolhouse, sadly in need of paint, 
and a dwelling where the only sign of life is a 
horse tethered in the door-yard. That is the vil- 
lage. On the transverse road, ribboning across 
the intervale hundreds of feet below, however, 



224 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

are strung like beads a few farm buildings, and 
they rise with the road on the farther slope, two 
miles away, to the timber line. In this beautiful, 
breezy, forgotten place no people pass, no sound 
breaks the stillness. Only the memory walks 
of a vanished community; almost, it seems, of a 
vanished race. 

The zummer air o' thease green hill 
'V a-heav'd in bosoms now all still, 
An' all their hopes an' all their tears 
Be unknown things ov other years. 

Yet read the signboard at the cross-roads. 
This village is but four miles from a busy modern 
town, on the main line of the railroad. It is, 
in reality, easily accessible. Just as it was easy 
once for its younger folk to drift down the hill 
to wider activities and a better living, so it will 
be easy for the return tide to set back up the hill. 
Its abandoned farms may yet be reclaimed, not, 
perhaps, by those seeking to work them for a 
living, though with their re-grown timber, their 
maple sap, their fertile intervales, that would not 
be impossible, especially should science and co- 
operation be applied to the task; but by those 



THE ABANDONED FARM 225 

seeking summer homes near the soil, amid beau- 
tiful scenery and pure air. Land is cheap in this 
forgotten township, and the scene as fair as any 
in this beautiful state. Like so many other of 
our New England hill towns, it waits its re-birth 
from the cities, from the very cities and the 
society which have drained it of its life-blood and 
left it an exquisite gray ruin of our once rugged 
pioneer life. 

The true explanation of the abandoned farm 
lies not so much in the native quality of the 
farmers — or their supposed lack of quality — 
as in the fact that a pioneer society cannot exist 
surrounded by civilization. Civilization opens 
a Pandora's box of desires and ambitions and dis- 
contents, and it creates, too, an increased expen- 
siveness of living which a pioneer society, with- 
out changing its methods, is unable to meet. To 
make the farm pay under the new conditions re- 
quires a knowledge that the pioneer, slow and 
simple by nature, too frequently cannot acquire. 
Take the matter of lumber. In our valley twenty 
years ago several parcels of woodland were sold 
for seven and one-half dollars each. Last year 



226 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

they were resold to the pulp men for one thousand 
dollars each, and that was less than their value. 
It is the men who originally sold their lots at 
such ruinous prices who have been forced to 
abandon their farms. Two years ago the farmer 
next to us sold the standing timber off his wood- 
land for one thousand dollars. Some of it was 
first-growth white pine, the rest good spruce. 
One thousand dollars seemed " a heap o' money " 
to him. The purchaser took out twelve thousand 
dollars' worth of lumber and pulp in a winter, 
but stripped the forest to bare soil in the cruel 
process. Our neighbor, had he been wiser to the 
demands of the outside market (and more ener- 
getic!) might have had it all for himself, and 
saved his young trees for another forest into the 
bargain. But in his eyes lumber had always been 
the cheapest thing on the place, to be had for the 
swing of an axe. 

So everywhere in these once gloriously tim- 
bered hills the " lumber kings " and the paper 
manufacturers have acquired their timber for a 
song, stripped the slopes to the bare rock, and 
left desolation behind where judicious lumbering 



THE ABANDONED FARM 227 

by the owners themselves (or under government 
restriction) might have preserved the forests in 
perpetual rotation and yielded an annual income. 
The one man in our fast vanishing village up the 
road who has kept hold of his forests and worked 
them properly himself drives in his motor-car 
past the dilapidated houses of his neighbors. 

But we have one citizen whose unfortunate 
lack of foresight even we can appreciate. He is 
close on ninety years old now, and last Fourth 
of July we got out the great ugly yellow landeau 
in which General Grant was hauled by eight pair 
of horses from Franconia to the Profile House 
on his famous tour of the country, we decorated 
it with streamers, and we rode " Old Man 
Cheeney" through the town, as a tribute to one 
whose luck was so colossally bad. Old Man 
Cheeney once owned the Profile Notch, and he 
sold it all for one hundred dollars! To-day, of 
course, it is one of the most valuable tracts of 
land in summer-resort America. It must be ad- 
mitted, however, that some of us pity the old 
gentleman more than seems necessary. His life 
has not been perceptibly shortened by depression. 



228 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

He allows he had a very good time with that 
hundred dollars ! 

To come down to lesser altitudes, I remember 
a wonderful walk in the northern hills of Massa- 
chusetts. The road, a mere trail, led up " steep 's 
yer hand " from the gorge of the Deerfield River 
to a fifteen-hundred- foot plateau commanding a 
glorious prospect. The first house on this plateau 
was falling to ruin. The second had fallen. The 
third was still inhabited. We knocked at the 
kitchen door to inquire the further direction of 
the road, which appeared suddenly to end in the 
chicken-coop. The girl who answered our knock 
was tall, pink-cheeked, as beautiful as any town 
or country could breed, and wore her gingham 
apron with patrician unconsciousness. No rustic 
bashfulness nor halting grammar marred her 
speech. It was we who were embarrassed by the 
surprise of her loveliness. 

" What a life for her on that desolate farm ! " 
we said to each other as we found the runaway 
road again and tramped on toward the distant 
village. 

But that night at the village we heard how she 



THE ABANDONED FARM 229 

had worked as a maid for the " summer folks " 
and sent herself to school and college, how she 
had learned to play the violin, how she now taught 
school " down to Springfield winters/' When 
her parents die, she will not return to the farm 
unless it be to reclaim it as a summer home. And 
what a home it would make, with its spring of 
icy water, its windy prospect of the world, its 
sugar grove and garden patch, its rambling 
barns, its berry fields and pastures and slope of 
timber ! But would it not be possible in her case 
to trace the first discontent to the " summer 
folks," the first opportunity to earn a schooling to 
them also, and so, ultimately, what may mean 
the reclamation of the whole beautiful plateau? 

Into that village, high on its hill beside the in- 
evitable mill-pond — the village of the Reverend 
Preserved Smith and still retaining in its reli- 
gion his liberality and independence of thought 
— the rural telephone has penetrated. 

" It 's a great blessing, 'specially if you 're on a 
party line," said our hostess. " An3 we 're all 
on party lines. Wait — " 

She went to the instrument, called a number, 



230 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and remarked, " That you, Bessie? What f s this 
I hear 'bout you 'n Jim breaking it off ? " 

We watched her smile as she listened to the 
answer. Then she said, " How 'd I hear it ? 
Why, Mrs. Asa Parker told me." 

She held the receiver free of her ear and 
beckoned us close. We heard distinctly an in- 
dignant voice exclaim, " Why, Sarah Bowers, I 
never said no such a thing ! " 

" I thought I 'd catch her," said Mrs. Bowers, 
when the telephone conversation was closed. 
" As I told you, the 'phone 's a great comfort to 
us all ! " 

But much more than the telephone is needed 
to make life in these hill towns either physically 
comfortable or intellectually satisfying to a people 
who by blood and nature are capable of a richer 
life. Far better abandoned farms than a race 
of poor whites evolved from the pioneer stock of 
the Puritans! But far better still that these 
farms, scattered over a land as lovely as the heart 
could desire, should once more blossom with 
crops and cluster in prosperous and contented 
communities. 



THE ABANDONED FARM 231 

This will be brought about — it is, indeed, al- 
ready being brought about — by a natural pro- 
cess of cooperation between the cities and the 
country, the former giving to the latter a sum- 
mer colony with its wider outlook, its better 
standards of living, its energetic and progressive 
ideas, to enliven the whole year and wake ambi- 
tion and effort, the latter giving to the former 
of its once abandoned farms and its ill-kept and 
unappreciated timber for summer homes and 
grounds. Nor is it easy to say who is benefited 
the more. 

We in our valley, and many others in similar 
valleys among the beautiful New England hills, 
have no desire to see our farms reclaimed by a 
reversal to feudalism. There are spots in New 
England where great wealth has clustered, where 
individuals have " bought up " five thousand 
acres, erected one hundred thousand dollar villas, 
stocked their pastures with imported cattle and 
their formal gardens with exotic plants, and re- 
duced the Yankees of the region to a kind of 
unacknowledged vassaldom. We want none of 
that. We ride over the stone roads of our 



2$2 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

one great landed proprietor, to be sure, with 
gratitude; but we neither envy him his for- 
mal garden nor desire more of his kind. We 
want to keep what farmers we have on their 
own farms, teaching them how to forest sci- 
entifically, how to attend to their soil and the 
rotation of their crops, affording them a sum- 
mer market by our presence, helping them to 
find a winter market for cream and eggs and 
apples and timber without the profit-eating 
middleman, and by our intercourse with them 
and their children we want to make their lives 
a little richer. Then we want to see our aban- 
doned farms taken up by those from the cities 
who have a little money to invest in a summer 
home, who delight in country life and country 
freedom, who will love our streams and woods 
and rocky hills, who know the primitive hunger 
" to grow their own garden truck," and who will 
mingle in our community on the terms of good- 
will and equality which its ancient stock deserves. 
We are not rich in the valley, but we are still 
almighty independent! 

And our abandoned farms are so cheap! No 



THE ABANDONED FARM 233 

one who buys a farm with a good view, good 
air, pure water, and plenty of trees is making a 
poor investment. There are at least eighty mil- 
lion more people in the United States than there 
were when our independence was won, but there 
are no more acres in the territory we now cover. 
A New England school teacher with a family of 
children bought a small house, still in good con- 
dition, a barn 60 X 40 feet, one hundred acres 
nearly half wooded, including the shore of a lake 
and a fine mountain prospect, for five hundred 
dollars. " Why pay summer rent ? " he asks. For 
even less an architect bought an abandoned ruin, 
down a forgotten lane, where only the strayed 
cows sought shelter under the tottering shed and 
the saplings by the wall had grown to trees which 
obliterated the view. The hand-hewn beams of 
this old house were the effective base of the 
scheme of remodelling. The trees were trimmed 
to disclose the nearby mountains. The old cin- 
namon rose-bush, trained to active life again, 
linked the dwelling with the past. And now the 
sugar grove and garden patch yield sufficient for 
a large family. The whole outlay, judged by the 



234 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

result, has been but a trifle. I know of a farm 
of one hundred and fifty acres, fifty acres heavy 
woodland, with a sugar grove, a tight house set 
on a hill commanding a prospect of the mountains, 
a big barn, and golf links within easy driving dis- 
tance, which sold two years ago for seven hundred 
dollars. The owner yearned for the nearer society 
of his kind during the long winters and " set up 
in business " in the town. The new owners, how- 
ever, seem quite contented on that breezy hillside. 
Their wood alone is worth the price they paid. 
They refuse to sell at anything like the old figure, 
as I have reason to know. They have energy and 
ideas and are making even this rocky, upland 
farm, which has no valley land, yield them a 
living. 

There is much talk of mission work among the 
" rural poor " of New England, and doubtless 
there is much need of it, in every rural region 
through the whole country, especially the need of 
visiting nurses and agricultural and sanitary edu- 
cation in the schools. Your farmer is as slow to 
apply science to his sink drain as to his timber 
patch or his potato field. But the mission work 



THE ABANDONED FARM 235 

our rural population most need is a re-stocking 
of the countryside with men and women of the 
new age, who will at once bring them a market 
for their produce and the stimulation of more 
advanced ideas and the touch of the outer 
world. Ex-President Cleveland, living on his 
reclaimed abandoned farm at Tamworth, N. H., 
with that democratic simplicity which was part 
of the man, in touch with all his neighbors, 
whether farmer- folk or summer colonists, inspir- 
ing new and better roads and drawing thither 
other colonists of his stamp, was, perhaps, almost 
the perfect example of the true missionary to the 
country. In New Hampshire, too, the sons or 
grandsons of the farmers have in many cases 
come back to establish summer homes " on the 
old place." Their natural affection for the town 
is stirred; their stay lengthens each year, or at 
any rate the stay of their families ; their children 
become more than half little countrymen. Their 
stock is better for the return, the countryside is 
better. Their children grow up with something 
of the old traditions, the old health, the old back- 
ground of a country boyhood, for which nothing 



236 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

in this world is quite a substitute; and the 
countryside is saved from one more ruin, one 
more melancholy ring of stone where the fire- 
weed blooms, and richer for better roads, pre- 
served forests, and neighboring farmers inspired 
to wiser efforts. 

I love the gray abandoned farms of our moun- 
tain intervales. I love to tramp alone up the road 
and sit on a log by the silent mill, looking down 
the deserted street and musing — if even that 
word does not imply too much concentrated 
thought — on the simple, primitive community 
which has passed. But it is a melancholy loveli- 
ness at best, and one which will not endure, for 
our abandoned houses are almost all of wood and 
are rapidly decaying, while the eager forest 
pushes down upon them, hungry for the land that 
has been stolen from it. Even more melancholy 
is the thought of thousands upon thousands of 
human beings cooped up as no human beings 
were ever meant to be in city flats, and little chil- 
dren learning of life between three-hundred- 
foot stone walls. The country needs these people, 
and these people need the country — most of 



THE ABANDONED FARM 237 

them more than they can guess. And I see our 
problem not as one of " missionary work " in any 
usual sense of that term, but as one of re-popu- 
lating our beautiful hills and gracious valleys 
with the stock of the cities — stock that shall 
come to us as " summer folks," to be sure, but 
not as transients; that shall come as men return 
to their fathers' hearths, that shall " come back 
home " — for it is not until a man owns the soil 
he stands upon, looks from his door-stone to the 
shadowed plumage of his trees, and plunges a 
spade in the ground, that he knows the true 
meaning of home. Let the cities have their flats, 
and let us live in them so long in the year as we 
must ; but shall that be all of life, that, and per- 
haps a summer boarding-house or a fussy motor- 
car ? I look down the green peace of our valley, 
walled by its wooded hills and the great blue 
heave of Moosilauke, I see the gray roofs of our 
abandoned farms, beautiful in their clearings, 
jewels on the thread of road — and they seem to 
me an irrefutable reply. 




A BERKSHIRE WINTER 

T was the seventh of November when win- 
ter began for us in the Berkshires. The 
day opened dull and gray, with a damp chill in the 
air. The chickadees gathered in the shelter of the 
Norway spruces before the house and pecked 
eagerly at the suet wired to a crotch. Under a 
leaden sky we drove northward along the road 
that skirts Stockbridge Bowl. The wind was keen 
out of the northwest and the white caps were 
chasing over the lake and splashing on the beach. 
Between us and the sources of the wind, West 
Stockbridge Mountain opposed its long, copper- 
colored battlement, copper-colored with the dead 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 239 

foliage still shredding the hard timber. The 
leaden clouds were racing up over its summit. 
Even as we watched, there was suddenly a puff of 
white vapor, like smoke, enshrouding its north- 
ward point. This smoke rapidly spread along the 
level summit, wiping it from sight, swept down 
the slope, wiping out the mountain, was caught by 
the wind and swirled over the lake. A spit of 
snow, a stinging flake on eyelash or lip, and then 
the white vapor was upon us. We were shrouded 
in winter. It was as if the long range of the 
mountain had been our protecting battlement, in- 
vaded, captured, overrun by all the cohorts of the 
frost and storm. 

The next day we woke into a picture-book 
world of sunshine and dazzling white. Every 
long, graceful limb of our Norway spruces was 
bowed with its burden, and the pines behind the 
house rested their white loads on the roof. As 
we looked from our windows, we seemed to be 
shut out from the world, to be dwelling in a 
frosted Christmas card. But the snow melted 
rapidly. By afternoon the roads were clear 
though muddy. We walked southward toward 



240 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

Monument Mountain, and came upon a newly 
ploughed field. Between each brown ridge of 
soil ran a furrow filled with snowy white. These 
beautiful parallels led over a doming ridge, like 
a striped carpet, to the feet of a red house tucked 
away amid its dark-green spruces. The design 
was exquisite for all its ruled primness. On the 
mountain the snow had not melted, and High 
Pasture looked as if some giant had dropped his 
napkin there. A red sunset illumined the vista 
of our drive when we reached home again, and 
glancing across our garden, which was in heavy 
shadow, we saw the dun hillside ablaze with the 
reflected glory, as if autumn had suddenly come 
back. But there was to be no more autumn for 
us. The snow which had melted speedily re- 
turned and did not melt, and there followed a 
long season of such exquisite colors and wood- 
land mysteries and roadside loveliness as the city 
dweller knows nothing of. Indeed, the man who 
knows the country only in summer has but little 
conception of nature's most beautiful effects, and 
as we tramped on our snowshoes through de- 
serted " formal gardens " and down the lanes be- 




The next day we woke into a picture-book world of sunshine and 
dazzling white. See page 239 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 241 

hind the closed and boarded-up summer estates 
which dot the Berkshire hillsides, we often won- 
dered what the owners find in town to compen- 
sate for these lost months, when autumn stains 
the woods and winter creeps through them with 
its glory of color on a key as different from sum- 
mer's key as minor from major, and then spring, 
resurgent, comes again, with apple blossoms in 
her hair. Perhaps the price of their estates is 
this lost vigil of the under-seasons, if winter be 
an under-season rather than the crown of the 
year! If that is so, we breathed pharisaical 
thanks for our poverty, as we cast one more 
backward glance at the deserted formal garden 
and the boarded mansion, and plunged into the 
wonder of the woods. Our house is small and 
humble behind its Norway spruces, but the fire 
is always alight on its hearth and there is always 
suet for the birds. 

There is a curious delusion that winter is a 
season without color. It is only a season with 
different color. Once live this season out close to 
mountains, forests, fields and stretches of culti- 
vated valley, and you may discover such lovely 



242 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

colors and such odd combinations as you never 
dreamed, or even days of absolute prismatic 
dazzle, reducing summer, by comparison, to a 
tame green velvet. Winter, to be sure, has its 
moods of black-and-white, when pictures are 
reduced to their simple elements of line and 
chiaroscuro. But even these are fascinating, 
as if nature w r ere bent upon showing you that 
she is not dependent on her color-box for her 
charm. 

In early winter, when the snow is yet light, you 
may walk up a back road through the timber and 
note where a wagon has turned off up a logging 
trail. The snow has melted in the wheel tracks, 
making two brown paths where the dead leaves 
show through. Those tracks have all the rich 
irregularity of the lines in an etching. Presently 
you come upon a brook, following it into the 
woods. It runs through the white carpet, quite 
black as if laid on with a free brush loaded with 
ink. There is ice in the back waters, and that is 
black too. The dark pines rise from its banks, 
straight, geometrical. Nature to-day is drawn, 
not painted, washed in with black-and-white. 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 243 

But emerging from the woods, even on a gray 
day without sun, color is sure somewhere to meet 
your eye, though it may be only the iron-rust 
brown of a tamarack swamp or the tawny red of 
a roadside willow. These browns and reds of 
winter are exquisite in their subdued richness, 
and under certain conditions of light they are 
thrown into combinations with other colors, at 
once daring and beautiful. It is toward the early 
winter sunset that the combinations are most 
effectively brought about. The valley lies quiet 
under its mantle of snow and ringed with its 
lovely hills. The frozen river winds through 
fringing willows. Tramping southward we see 
the willows on Muddy Brook like a screen of 
fantastic tracery across a white field, isolated by 
snow and sky, composed and bitten sharply like 
an etching. Presently the far-off blue dome of 
Mount Everett comes into view, cleanly outlined 
against a pale and luminous sky tinging into 
green, for sunset is drawing on. The snow- 
feathered slopes of Beartown Mountain to the 
east are turning pink. Pink changes slowly to 
purple, to amethyst. The ring of hills that wall 



244 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

our valley stand up like jewels. Beyond the un- 
broken white of the roadside meadow the edge of 
the swamp wears a shadowy veil of the same 
color, but subdued, mysterious. Out of the 
swamp rise the rusty tamaracks and lay their 
rich reddish-brown in delicate, smoky tufts 
against the amethyst hills. Only Mount Everett 
far to the south remains a pure, ethereal blue 
under the green sunset. The winter, world is 
still. We hear our own footsteps creak on the 
frozen snow. Everything is cool, peaceful, and 
the color chord of sky and hills and rusty swamp 
is like the opening chord of some andante by 
Mozart, sad only with the wistfulness of serene 
and perfect things. 

But the winter colors may be gay as well. For 
sheer ecstasy of delicate color, what can match 
the lavender stalk of a blackberry vine rising 
out of the snow by a half-buried stone wall, and 
shining in the sun? We grow enthusiastic over 
the pink of Japanese cherry blossoms splashed 
charily upon a screen. Here is a subject for a 
screen by our New England roadside — the field 
of virgin white snow, the horizontal design of 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 245 

gray stone wall, and rising with a graceful curve 
the lavender stalks of the blackberry vines. It is 
as Japanese as anything in Japan, even to the 
gray chickadee perched on the topmost spray! 
Then there are the tawny tiger-coated willows, 
which sometimes rise almost like a flame against 
a background of evergreen or are flanked by the 
silvery white of the birches. In the woods, too, 
the green of summer persists till winter is in full 
command. On the southern slopes of the moun- 
tains we have come upon ferns still flaunting 
through the snow and partridge berry vines 
scratched up into sight by some hungry bird; 
and always the bright sun reflects the gleam of 
the birches and throws the evergreens into bril- 
liant relief. 

How the woods improve in winter, too, over 
the desolation of the formal gardens! The gar- 
den fountain is boxed up, and the sundial. The 
rose-bushes are packed in straw and broken pine 
boughs. The clipped and mathematical ever- 
greens are pathetic in their stunted formality, as 
they are mercilessly cut out against the white 
snow and the dazzling landscape beyond. Mi- 



246 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

nerva's bust on her pedestal amid the naked tree- 
trunks at the edge of the woods presides over the 
desolation, as disconsolate as the boarded foun- 
tain and the shuttered house behind. But we 
point our snowshoes up the forest path, brushing 
the snow from the laden boughs, and presently 
in a mountain clearing we come upon another 
garden where nature has been the sole designer, 
to the confusion of Man. 

For all we can say, the level acre of snow be- 
fore us might cover roses and flower-beds. It is 
the dazzling foreground of the composition. 
Beyond it, the hill drops away, and at the rim, set 
as formally as you please but trimmed only by 
the wind and sun, is a hemlock hedge, one tall 
tree in the centre flanked by green of lower 
growth. To left and right birches and chestnuts 
complete the composition, and beyond rises the 
steep hillside on the one hand, drops away the 
valley on the other, drops to the rolling white 
fields, the lake, then rises again some miles away 
to the blue wall of a mountain. Juggle with 
nature as you will, plant and prune, rule and trim, 
somewhere in the woods and hills behind your 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 247 

house she will excel you, make all your work look 
ridiculous and mean. 

Perhaps by some association of ideas formed 
long ago in childhood, a " white Christmas " has 
meant for me not so much a frosted, dazzling 
morning as a still, quiet evening when the red 
lights of a house amid evergreens shine friendly 
over the snow. Was it some Christmas card 
which caught my childish fancy, or a paragraph 
out of Andersen, or a sight of my own home with 
the evening lamps aglow, which has fixed this 
association in my brain? I cannot say. But 
when Christmas eve drew on last year the old 
association haunted me, and as darkness en- 
veloped our quiet village street I stole out into 
the white mystery of new-fallen snow and slunk 
off through the garden. Reaching thus by devi- 
ous backways, including the cemetery, the end of 
the street, I turned toward home, encountering 
nobody save a child, who was ecstatically stagger- 
ing under a huge bundle. From the windows of 
each house the lamps were shining, making 
golden squares of warm light amid the trees and 
over the snow. The dim, forgotten pages of my 



248 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

childhood turned back in my brain. I felt, with- 
out being able to say why or when, my father's 
arms lifting me up, and saw through sleepy eyes 
a door opening a golden welcome in the night. A 
strange, half -remembered story of some cottage 
in the winter forest, where a wood-chopper lived 
with his children and witches were about, floated 
pleasantly through my consciousness. I drew 
near my own house. Through the Norway 
spruces of the drive its window squares were 
gleaming. It was mine, my home ! The warmth 
was crackling from my hearth ! The welcome of 
my loved ones waited me ! Like the veriest Sen- 
timental Tommy, I pretended I was an exile re- 
turning. My heart was actually beating high as 
I opened the door. The smell of supper greeted 
me, the delicious warmth of wood fires. I gath- 
ered her I love hungrily to my heart, but I could 
not tell her why. One cannot explain such things 
as that, the mysterious linking with all one's emo- 
tional nature of a golden window square across 
the winter snow. 

Neither can one fully analyze that melancholy 
death in life which accompanies an untimely 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 249 

January thaw. Some morning the south wind 
sets in, the mercury rises higher and higher, a 
languid, drizzling rain comes over the mountain, 
and by the following afternoon the brown ridges 
are showing through the snow on the ploughed 
lands, the sloppy roads are stripped to their under 
layer of ice, and from all the earth rises a thick, 
enervating steam, so that one might be moving 
in a sea fog. Only the tops of the high hills stand 
up above this vapor, as if they were suspended 
in mid-air. It may be in the country we are too 
dependent on the weather for our moods. At 
such a time, at any rate, bicker raises its ugly 
head in many a household, and one tears up at 
noon and consigns to the spluttering Franklin 
stove the literary creation of a morning. 

And then comes the resurrection of the frost. 
Forewarned by the growing chill at night, so that 
in the darkness we have sat up in bed and hauled 
added covering over us, we wake into a new 
world of dazzling wonder. The rain and mist 
have frozen on every bush and twig, on every 
wire and fence, on pole and limb and even on 
the very sides of the houses. The trees are 



250 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

bowed with their load of jewels, and even the 
modest birches are brazen with diamonds. The 
world flashes like a prism in the sun; the hum- 
blest shrub in the garden is a burning bush of 
rainbow tints. Slipping and falling on the peril- 
ous ground, we climb hastily to the top of the 
nearest hill before the wonder shall melt. It is 
a strange, transformed universe we look down 
upon. Beyond the foreground the prismatic 
colors are lost. The upland pasture at our feet 
is a crystal carpet flashing with violet, indigo, 
green, and red, but far below the frosted low- 
lands are merely white and upon them each iso- 
lated chestnut or elm stands up with startling dis- 
tinctness, glistening, translucent, like a fountain 
strangely crystallized. Beyond the lowlands, the 
nearer mountains are a soft, feathery gray, save 
where the sun catches their summits and lays 
upon them a glittering corona. Beyond them, 
in turn, are the far ranges of the next valley, blue 
no longer, but a pale, soft, smoky, shadow tint, 
and looking liquid as water, looking, indeed, like 
waves heaving along the horizon. Once in the 
winter the world is like this to remind us, per- 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 251 

haps, that the universe we customarily know is 
but one of a thousand possible universes, after 
all, and far from the most marvellous. 

Bolton Coit Brown has studied the delicate 
landscape values in the drifting snowstorm. We 
can see his pictures reproduced on the scale of 
nature from our garden. Suppose we let (1) 
represent the darkest spot on the picture, our 
gaunt grape trellis in the foreground, for in- 
stance. Then (2) will represent the nearer trees 
in the orchard just beyond; (3) the farther trees 
and a pine across the brook; (4) will represent 
the ethereal, half -shrouded trees about our neigh- 
bor's house up the slope, and the glimpse of the 
gable and chimney. Beyond that, there is noth- 
ing but the living whiteness of the storm. We 
have a picture in five delicate values only; a 
picture where nearly everything is eliminated but 
the grape arbor, the ghostly arms of the orchard 
trees, and the hint of a house. Yet how beautiful 
the picture is, how suggestive, thus reduced to 
its lowest terms ! It is Japanese in its decorative 
simplicity. One day, I recall, a wheelbarrow had 
been left out, with a load of dead apple boughs 



252 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

upon it, and served instead of the grape arbor as 
the darkest point of the picture. It was curiously 
transformed into a thing of beauty, and as the 
white snow drifted into a heap upon it, softening 
its outlines, it appeared to grow larger, to com- 
pose the picture about itself. I left it there till 
the storm began to clear, other values emerged, 
and finally the top of a mountain jumped into 
view and reduced the barrow to humbleness and 
its proper scale once more. 

There come country days in March, the truth- 
ful recorder must admit, when even the run of 
sap from the maples and the smell of it boiling 
in the sugar house cannot quite drive out a dis- 
gust for muddy roads and melting snow, and a 
desire for the feel under foot of paved walks, for 
the bustle of cities, the scent and sound of the 
opera. A fresh snow flurry inspires the same 
resentment as a clumsy person who does not 
know how to make his exit from a room. One 
waits for spring with the same uneasy feeling, 
the sense of wasted time, that one waits for a 
delayed train, or for the conductor to come for 
the fares. But on a magic March morning one 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 253 

suddenly awakes an hour before his custom and 
hears from the garden, not the pleasant call of 
the chickadees, familiar all winter, but a new, 
full-throated, liquid song bursting out of every 
evergreen and bush. The morning sun is stream- 
ing through the window square. The cover-lid 
feels heavy and hot. You climb from bed and 
hurry out into the garden. Before you, at every 
step, rise from the ground and flutter a little way 
ahead, instantly to resume their amazingly rapid, 
twin-footed dabs for a breakfast, the brownish- 
red bodies of innumerable fox-sparrows. A 
robin sings in the apple-tree. Wait a day or two 
and you will see, among the red fox-sparrows, 
the white-tail feathers of a vesper, and hear his 
lovely song at twilight. Winter is over, spring 
is on the way. Your longing for opera vanishes 
like a mist. You have a sweeter vesper song; a 
hundred feathered Carusos are in every hedge. 

Before I sat clown to write this morning, Joe 
called me out to talk seeds. He has the hot- 
beds uncovered and the dressing in. Where 
shall we put the sweet-peas? and the melons? 
How many pounds of fertilizer shall we need for 



254 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the potatoes? Will the Golden Bantam cross- 
fertilize with the Country Gentleman if we plant 
them together at the usual end of the garden for 
corn? A thousand important questions arise. 
We walked in the garden to settle them, the spar- 
rows and robins hopping and fluttering before us, 
the air warm and sunny, the hedges musical. 
Yet dabs of snow still lay in sheltered corners, 
and lifting our eyes to High Pasture we could 
see great patches of it white on the mountain. 
As Joe plunged his fork into the dark loam of 
the hot-bed, I made a snowball and tossed it 
toward a robin. 

" Joe," said I, " spring won't really be here till 
I can find a blade of grass big enough to blow." 

" Sure, it 's here," he answered. " Oi seen the 
boys playin' marbles this mornin'." 

Marbles ! Marbles are not a game, except on 
the pavements of a city. They are a votive offer- 
ing to spring and dry sidewalks, a celebration of 
the departure of the frost from the ground. The 
frost in our town usually departs first from the 
walk along the stone wall in front of the Episco- 
pal Church, and it is there, almost under the 



A BERKSHIRE WINTER 255 

shadow of the cross, that the boys celebrate their 
pagan, innocent Easter. If Joe saw them at it 
this morning, I am willing to accept the sign, and 
bid winter farewell. 

The slush of another snowball crumbled and 
melted in my hand. The climbing sun grew 
warmer and warmer on my neck. I looked back 
toward the house, where my study door stood 
open, the portal of duty, and sighed. I looked the 
other way, toward the mountain, and the scent 
of arbutus came to me with almost physical dis- 
tinctness. Thus easily do we lay off the love of 
one season for the love of the next, and slip from 
an old pleasure to a new without regrets. 

But, after all, is it not a pharisaical pleasure, 
this of the wind and weather, the sky and grass? 
Why should one write about them as if they were 
of profound importance? Few of us are Words- 
worthians by belief. We feel depressed or gay 
according to the state of the weather, to be sure ; 
but we are no less affected by the state of our 
stomachs or our bank accounts, and quite as 
many of us, surely, make a religion of our bellies 
or our bank accounts, as of nature ! Why should 



256 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

I feel this superiority to my city brother, which 
I undoubtedly do feel, because I happen to have 
a garden full of sunshine, fox-sparrows, and 
swelling apple buds, while he has only the shop- 
windows on the Avenue and the smell of asphalt 
to tell him winter has departed and spring is on 
the flood? Beside his warm steam radiator last 
winter he certainly felt no envy of me because 
in my ring of purple hills the chill landscape was 
exquisite with minor chords. Perhaps he feels 
no envy of me now, save for a few days while his 
spring fever lasts. 

Yet I am Pharisee enough to pity him. With 
or without philosophy, the wind and weather, 
the sky and grass, lay their spell upon me, bid- 
ding me be near to them, responsive to their 
mood, and whispering to my spirit that their com- 
panionship is more to be desired than many 
riches, yea even than many friends. Since this 
message reaches me through my senses, I fear I 
am but a poor descendant of the Puritans, though 
I live in the land of Jonathan Edwards and pass 
his monument every day. 





XIII 
ROADSIDE GARDENS 
MOTOR pulled up at the cross-roads this 
morning evidently waiting until my dog 
and I reached the spot. Three goggled fat women 
sat on the rear seat. A goggled fat man and a 
goggled chauffeur sat on the front. All five were 
covered with dust. The goggled fat man had a 
map spread out on his fat knee. " Pardon me," 
he said, running his fat finger over this map, 
"but can you direct us to Great Barrington? 
We can't quite make out the road." 

I gave them the directions, and the chauffeur 
backed the car halfway around, cut out his 
muffler, and sent the machine with a leap and 



258 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

an explosion like a battery of Gatling guns tear- 
ing down the road. It disappeared in a cloud of 
dust. 

" Barney/' said I to my dog, " they are seeing 
the Berkshires." 

Barney looked up, wagging his tail, and then 
set off into the field on a woodchuck scent. I con- 
tinued my plod up the side road till presently I 
reached the Berkshire garden which I sought, 
and the perfect view of Monument Mountain. 
There were no motor tracks in the road here, 
since it leads only to a little pond and a farm or 
two, ending against the wooded hill. It was a 
clear autumn morning, crisp without chill, and 
fragrant as new cider. Already the pageant of 
the season was being staged over hill-slope and 
swamp. The red banners of October were flying 
in the woods, and with every gust of wind a 
little battalion of dead leaves roused into life in 
the road at my feet and rushed forward as upon 
some foe. 

The spot where I paused was on a slight ele- 
vation of pasture land, commanding a wide pros- 
pect. The road was bounded by low stone walls, 




There were no motor tracks in the road here, since it leads only to a 
little pond and a farm or two, ending against the wooded hill 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 259 

gray and half hidden with careless briars. A 
few hundred rods ahead, where the road dipped 
through a tamarack swamp, lay a little pond re- 
flecting now the autumn foliage on its banks like 
colors laid on a palette of black glass. To the 
right, across the fields, a mouse-gray farmhouse 
nestled in an orchard, two piles of bright red 
apples under the trees adding a rich and cheerful 
note. Immediately at my feet on either side of 
the brown carpet of fallen leaves and extending 
to the gray stone walls, were two delicate and 
exquisite garden beds, sown with the careless 
symmetry of nature. They held little blue asters, 
sometimes called iron weed asters ; just that and 
no more, save a few feathery tufts of dead grass 
between the clusters of blooms. These little 
asters, which flower after the frost, hold a faintly 
faded blue of summer in their tiny petals and 
spread a bit of sky along our New England road- 
sides more satisfying and suggestive to me than 
any formal border on the grandest estate. 

Just behind the stone wall to the left of my 
roadside garden rose a single white pine, bifur- 
cated near the ground as pines so often are when 



260 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

they stand alone, and extending wide lateral 
branches. One of these branches hung over the 
wall like the binding line of a Japanese design, 
and beneath it, two miles distant across a corn- 
field and the green-spired expanse of a young 
hemlock wood, rose the solid battlement of Mon- 
ument Mountain, proud with its banners of 
autumn, perfectly framed by the pine above and 
the wild garden of roadside asters below. The 
corn was stacked in the foreground field and 
orange pumpkins glowed against the brown soil. 
The odor of autumn was in the air, the smell of 
fallen leaves and garnered corn. I put my pipe 
in my pocket and sat down on the wall. 

Presumably, by the time I had looked and 
sniffed my fill, my fat friends in their motor, who 
were " seeing the Berkshires," had passed under 
the crags of Monument, where the cotton mills 
huddle, and were tearing along beside the trolley 
track on their way to Great Barrington and lunch. 
It was little enough of the true Berkshires they 
had seen, or ever would see — the true charm of 
our hills and valleys lying in these lovely pictures 
which everywhere abound, under the limb of a 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 261 

pine, down the vista of a country road, between 
the shaggy trunks of the sugar maples, or across 
green meadows to the silvery willows and the 
winding river — pictures which are only to be had, 
however, for a little searching and experiment, 
and savored at leisure and in quiet. Of the road- 
side gardens they could know less than nothing, 
for these fairest jewels of old New England lie 
too close under their rushing wheels, and demand 
beside for their savoring a certain meekness and 
delicacy of spirit, a childlike content to roam 
slowly in small spaces and find beauty and happi- 
ness in the common things of the wayside. One 
of the greatest of American artists, and one of 
the gentlest and sweetest of men, has planted the 
roadside before his house with goldenrod, though 
formal terraces and marble gates and all exotic 
blooms were at his command. I like to read a 
symbol of his greatness in those careless drifts 
of gold, and in the sturdy apple-trees which stand 
beyond them up the slope to his spacious dwelling. 
Indeed, there is many a symbol to be found, 
and many a lesson read, in our American road- 
side gardens, alike for the elevation of our spirit 



262 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

and the improvement of our garden craft. One 
of the quaintest of misconceptions in our garden- 
ing is the too frequent attempt to reproduce a 
Japanese effect on an estate in Long Island or 
Westchester or New England. The first prin- 
ciple of Japanese gardening, underlying even its 
religious formalism, is the principle of landscape 
reproduction. The Japanese garden, though it 
be made in a pie plate, must reproduce a native 
landscape of Japan. The Japanese art of dwarf- 
ing trees, of course, is an outcome of necessity, 
to maintain the proportions of nature. Such 
flowers, even, as are found in the Japanese gar- 
den are there not for their own sakes but because 
they belong to the landscape. The true Japanese 
garden in America, then, would contain no per- 
golas and moon bridges and stone lanterns and 
wistaria. It would much more properly contain 
a bit of old road winding between gray walls 
fringed with clematis and asters into the shadow 
of the pines or the emerald shimmer of the birch 
woods. Over its water feature woulS hang the 
purple of wild grapes ; and water lilies, not lotos, 
would nod on the ripples. The " tea house " 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 263 

would be a square, mouse-gray dwelling, repro- 
duced to scale, with great central chimney and 
lean-to roof behind, the type which all of us 
associate with our fairest and most characteristic 
country landscapes. Against the weathered clap- 
boards of this house the hollyhocks would nod, 
and in spring its gray would be exquisite amid 
the bursting pink of the orchard. 

Such would be the true Japanese garden in 
America. Does one exist? Our architects, at 
the instigation of our " captains of industry," go 
gleefully forth and crown a New England hilltop 
with an Italian villa, planting Lombardy poplars 
where oak and pine and maple grew, to say noth- 
ing of the stately elm. They go into a tract of 
woods, hew out an opening, and erect a French 
Renaissance chateau of imported marble, with 
bay trees on the terraces, lotos in the fountain 
pool, and rare, exotic blooms in a thousand for- 
mal beds where marble statues stand and seem 
ashamed of their nakedness. To me, at least, 
such estates and gardens are the Twentieth Cen- 
tury equivalent of the French-roofed houses with 
a tower at one corner and great lawns sloping up 



264 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

broken by a huge ugly bed of canna and an iron 
deer, which were the acme of taste in our mid- 
Victorian era. Our estates cost more now, and 
we copy better models. We have substituted 
Donatello for the iron deer. But we are little 
nearer either an architecture or a garden craft 
of our own. Especially in our gardens, the New 
England back road still shames us in its artless 
use of native materials and the simplicity and 
grace of its effects. The old New England farm- 
house against a backing of orchard, pine and 
wooded hills, seen up an undulating road bor- 
dered with pink and gold and azure blue, still puts 
to shame our modern country villas amid their 
pseudo-Italian or French or Japanese gardens — 
sometimes all three together, with a dash of 
Tudor-English thrown in. Because it is indige- 
nous to its site and soil, it has the ultimate quality 
of spontaneity, and hence it is seemly and beauti- 
ful. As once we were in our literature, so we are 
still in our gardening — too often mere parrots. 
A true Japanese garden is the concentrated deli- 
cacy and fragrance of the landscape of Japan. 
How many American gardens catch and com- 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 265 

pose in little the charm and freshness of our na- 
tive landscape ? Do we think, when we enter our 
gardens, of nature and the peace of nature, and 
its pictorial magic ? Or do we think of a florist's 
catalogue and a photograph of Italy? For me, 
I prefer a certain cross-road triangle of wild sun- 
flowers and thistles to your formal beds of phlox 
that lead to a Grecian pergola behind a Tudor 
sundial, flanked by a Japanese pool and an Italian 
Renaissance stone bench. 

One of the roads winds down the hill to Tyring- 
ham, through ranks of giant sugar maples that 
on the dullest day of autumn seem to hold the im- 
prisoned sunlight in their golden depths, and in 
midsummer frame between their shaggy trunks 
the level meadows far below, the roofs of the vil- 
lage, and the distant hills beyond. When you 
come to the cross-road, your ear catches the 
tinkle of a brook, and your dog, sniffing water, 
disappears into the bushes, whence you hear his 
greedy lapping. The spot is warm and sunny, the 
sound of water refreshing. In the untrimmed 
delta, so common where country roads intersect, 
the wild sunflowers grow shoulder high, and 



266 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

among them, forcing their heads up level with 
the golden blooms, hundreds of pink thistles add 
their delicate but daring color. Over this bank 
of pink and gold hovers in midsummer a shimmer 
of brown, rising as you draw near — a cloud of 
tiny butterflies; and in it incessantly, warm as 
the sun itself, stirs and hums the business of the 
bees. There are few passers on this Berkshire 
byway. The valley town lies far below, reached 
by other roads less steep. The gorgeous garden 
spreads its colors for the bees and butterflies and 
for an occasional farmer on his way to market. 
It asks no care of any one, no trimming of the 
edges nor thinning of the roots. It is just a jewel 
set in the landscape by a better Architect than 
we, on the sleepy road to Tyringham. 

Such gardens, with as limitless a variety and 
succession of wild blooms as any garden annual 
can compile for you, are still common on our 
American back roads. They used to be common 
everywhere, before the invasion of lumbermen, 
telegraph and telephone poles, stone crushers and 
other servants of utility. They might be common 
still for a little love and care. The wanton de- 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 267 

struction of timber on the borders of our public 
roads, once universal, is yielding slowly to a more 
enlightened sentiment. But there is no more 
reason why the wild flowers on the untimbered 
borders should be mercilessly mowed down, and 
the roadsides reduced to ugly stubble. One prays 
sometimes for a Senhouse in every American 
county, to re-sow our highways with their natural 
wild loveliness, to weave our roads into the land- 
scape with a binding chord of color, to show us 
in time, perhaps, how we might, out of native 
materials, achieve a garden craft of our own. 
So far as we know, this is an opportunity the vil- 
lage improvement socities have not yet grasped. 
Their activities mostly cease where the houses 
of the town cease and the true landscape begins. 
What formal drive on the most elaborate of 
estates can match for beauty the bend of the 
country road into the dark shadows of the hem- 
locks, where the banks are lush with moss, and 
on this richest green velvet the scarlet bunch- 
berries glow? Perhaps, too, a tiny thread of 
water runs by the road, fringed with gentians. 
The road is unparched and cool, the green moss 



268 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

cool, the color rich but sparing, the shadowing 
trees stately and quiet as a church. You will go 
far amid the gardens made by man, to match it. 
Nor will you easily match so humble a garden as 
a field of that stubborn shrubby-cinqfoil some 
New Englanders wrongly call " hardhack," when 
on a neglected slope it spreads its yellow blooms 
from the roadside to the border of the forest or 
the green bulwark of a mountain. Pure gold it is 
amid the pasture rocks, and cow paths wind be- 
tween the clumps with a quaint suggestion of a 
map of Boston. And can you better that shrub- 
bery effect where the laurel is massed against the 
trees, and the road bends around it as if in defer- 
ence to its charm ? 

Few of my readers, probably, have been in 
Mount Washington Township in the southwest 
corner of Massachusetts, an upland plateau be- 
hind Mount Everett. The post-office is the top 
of a desk in a boarding house, and boasts nine 
boxes. Mount Washington Township is not 
densely populated. But it has in prodigal profu- 
sion what many a gardener would perjure his 
soul to possess — established clumps of mountain 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 269 

laurel, eight and ten feet high and sometimes 
forty feet in circumference, lining every road- 
side, lifting proudly over every gray stone wall, 
and stretching up the pastures into the mountain 
forest till the hill-slopes fairly riot with their 
wealth of pink. Mountain laurel has been occa- 
sionally transplanted with success; but usually 
the most careful attempts to domesticate it fail. 
It demands to be let alone, amid its pasture rocks 
and briars, the self-sufficient aristocrat of our 
native landscape. Some of us love it the better 
for this, and make annual pilgrimage to the gar- 
dens where it grows, nor find its loveliness less 
because it flames by gray stone walls and over 
rocks and briars instead of beside formal paths 
and upon clipped lawns; and because beyond it 
we see not an Italian garden and the stone portals 
of a French chateau, but only green rows of corn, 
perhaps, and a mouse-gray barn and then the 
doming ridge of the Taconic Hills. We like to 
think that laurel is one of those things money can- 
not buy. We cannot have a formal garden with 
a marble sundial and lotos flowers on the pool. 
But, for a ten-cent fare on the trolley to South 



270 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

Egremont and a five-mile walk past a perpetual 
roadside garden and a dancing brook, we can 
achieve such pink glory as no nursery-man 
ever rivalled, where the only gardeners are the 
cows. 

The Japanese scorn roses as too " obvious," 
though they cultivate, somewhat paradoxically 
it seems to us, the peony. There is something 
a little showy about roses, however, something 
suggestive of feminine vanity and expense, es- 
pecially when they are cultivated in formal beds 
and forced for large and odorous blooms. But 
the climbing rambler would be a sorry loss as an 
aid to architectural picturesqueness, and against 
the American wild rose, surely, no Japanese 
could cavil, for in its manner of growth, its deli- 
cacy and its harmony with the landscape, it is 
almost the most Japanese of all our flowers. It 
opens its heart by the wayside when the world is 
growing lush with green, and beside old fences 
hung with clematis or gray walls where the blue- 
berries are coming to fruit, it masses its pink 
blooms, each one delicate and perfect but all to- 
gether making a rich note of color against the 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 271 

virgin green and white of little birches and the 
golden summer fields. How carelessly massed 
the wild roses grow, yet how they seem to fall 
into skilfully calculated beds. They add warmth 
to the June day, and they add a delicate wist ful- 
ness, too, by their individual quality of petal and 
feminine poise, even as MacDowell has caught 
them in his music. To one who loves nature 
(oh, perilous phrase!), and flowers as a part 
$ of nature, of the landscape, of the pictorial 
loveliness of the world, the wild rose gar- 
den by the wayside has a charm and beauty 
no collection of her showier sisters behind a 
yew hedge, bounded by formal paths, can hope 
to match. 

The more striking of roadside shrubbery plant- 
ing, such as the clumped sumac, rich in autumn 
with its red leaves and deep, luscious red bloom 
spikes, has been frequently copied by gardeners, 
employing the same material. The fragrant trail- 
ing clematis, too, running wild over wall and 
fence, runs no less readily to rule, though seldom 
in the formal garden has it the same charm in 
winter, when, by the wayside wall, the white 



172 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

relics of its blossoms are borne on delicate sprays 
against the snowy mystery of buried fields and 
shrouded hemlocks. We prize the flowers of 
spring, as well, and save a corner of our garden 
to hold the trilliums, the bluets, the anemones, the 
violets, the columbines, which grow so carelessly 
just out of the wheel ruts on the borders of coun- 
try roads, as if they had come down from the 
woods and fields to speak the passer-by of May. 
Yet even with our most careful art we can hardly 
rival the white snowfall of hepaticas under leaf- 
less trees nor catch the careless grace of a colum- 
bine swaying its red bells on a ledge of rock 
above the bend of the road, a ledge where the vio- 
lets climb up from the ferns and the shy anemones 
lurk in the grass. Nor shall our garden hold 
that vista round the curve, of wood and field and 
purple hills. 

Of the humbler flowers, the roadside weeds, 
few are the praises sung, though Thoreau did say 
of mullein that it is " so conspicuous with its 
architectural spire, the prototype of cande- 
labrums." But one expects the praise of humble 
weeds from Thoreau. There are among the li- 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 273 

brary poets no sonnets to hardhack or orange 
milkweed, no odes to toad-flax, no lyrics to cele- 
brate hemp weed or bed straw. Yet each in its 
season praises its Maker with bloom and color 
along our northern roads, and adds to artless 
gardens the charm of its petals and fragrance. 
What the farmer knows as wild carrot bears a 
dainty, Tiat-topped white bloom sometimes as 
large as a saucer, and a long bed of them will 
often appear like a strip of delicate embroidery 
along the wayside, making their more aristocratic 
title of Queen Anne's lace entirely applicable. In 
winter, too, they are still beautiful, for the 
blooms curl up on the tall, dry stalks and hold, 
after a storm, each its little cup of snow. In- 
deed, there is seldom the stark desolation of the 
formal garden in winter about the roadside gar- 
den. There is, primarily, always the line of the 
road and the white, encompassing, free land- 
scape. Then there are, beside the cups of the 
wild carrots, the glowing berries of the bitter- 
sweet, a red limb of them hung athwart the 
snowy world as if New England were intent to 
show that it, too, can produce a Japanese screen ; 



274 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the lavender stalks of blackberry vines; the 
tawny stems of the willows. In autumn 
asters bloom when the frost has killed the last 
of the flowers in the formal garden, and when 
all the leaves are gone there is still the belated 
blossom of the witch hazel, shining like thin 
gold where, a burning bush, it crests a bank 
against the western sun. 

" The housewives of Nature," said Thoreau, 
" wish to see the rooms properly cleaned and 
swept before the upholsterer comes and nails 
down his carpet of snow. The swamp burns 
along its margin with the scarlet berries of the 
black alder, or prinos; the leaves of the pitcher 
plant (which old Josselyn called Hollow-leaved 
Lavender) abound, and are of many colors from 
plain green to a rich striped yellow, or deep 
red." 

It is just here, where the roacl crosses a swamp 
and is raised a little above the surrounding level, 
that one sees his roadside garden stretching off 
and merging completely with the landscape. 
Above tall grasses the taller stalks of the cat-o'- 
nine-tails lift their brown fingers ; the irises gem 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 275 

the sedge, scattered like stars, not lined in for- 
mal rows as in a man-made garden; the brown- 
ish-red pitcher plants in bloom glimmer dully; 
or over against the woods the sticky wild azalea, 
or meadow pink, masses its color and sends out 
all the long June day its incomparable perfume. 
Perhaps a dark swamp pool is pricked with water 
lilies, and tall brake or modest maiden-hair 
fringes the slope at your feet. Such, in one 
season or another, is the roadside swamp, a gar- 
den wandering with the leisure of still water 
courses away into the woods or fields, as much a 
permanence of the landscape as the sky above 
your head or the far horizon line. 

Did you ever notice a country boy on the face 
of the fields? He goes about his business curi- 
ously a part of nature, it may be industriously 
gathering nuts under a brown hickory, or a tiny 
figure disappearing over a pasture ridge or cross- 
ing a square of stubble surrounded to the knees 
by a swarm of startled grasshoppers. He fits 
into the landscape like a squirrel or a bird. So 
the little orange and gold blooms of the paint- 
brush in the grass by the wayside, or the Cana- 



276 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

dian lilies looking up over a wall, or the banks of 
goldenrod and asters laying their splendid colors 
with the curve of the road mile on mile, have no 
blight of artifice upon them, but, though seen, 
are yet unseen, are rather felt as a part of the 
peace and loveliness of nature. They do not as- 
sault you with their showiness, they and their 
sisters, nor cry of their clever arrangement nor 
whisper excitedly to the breeze that the house 
up the path cost two hundred thousand dol- 
lars. They are humble weeds at best, wind- 
sown, bird-scattered, bound into a wild gar- 
land only by the ribbon of the road. They 
are fairest on neglected byways, and for him 
who still tramps the byways they are garden 
enough. What need hath he of vast estates 
whose ways lie where the mountain laurel climbs 
the hills or the purple of flowering raspberry and 
the tiny jewels of gold-thread are the foreground 
for a vista of falling brook and emerald vale to 
the blue dome of the Taconics ? What gardened 
estate shall ever satisfy him, indeed, that does 
not hold something of the simplicity and wild 
grace and pictorial naturalness of this rural 



ROADSIDE GARDENS 277 

America, of this landscape which shall always be 
to him as the thought of home? 

It was an old road out of Concord that Tho- 
reau hymned, in one of his lyric passages : " The 
May weed looks up in my face there, the pale 
lobelia and the Canada snapdragon; a little 
hardhack and meadow-sweet peep over the fence ; 
nothing more serious to obstruct the view, and 
thimble berries are the food of thought (before 
the drought), along by the walls. A road that 
passes over the height-of-land, between earth and 
heaven, separating those streams which flow 
earthward from those which flow heavenward." 

He did not scorn the flowers, intent on this 
high rhapsody. To him they were lovely and of 
good report. He only asked that they should not 
shut out his transcendental view. Even in more 
earth-bound mood we may well ask of gardens 
that they do not shut out our view of nature, and 
even though they be but a screen against our 
neighbor's clothes-yard that they seem less a hor- 
ticultural display than a bit of spontaneous 
growth from the soil wherein they stand. The 
larger our gardens are planned, the more feasible 



278 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

it becomes to make them truly spontaneous and 
reproductive of the landscape, or a part and par- 
cel with it. Toward that achievement many 
an old New England roadside still points the 
way. 





XIV 
NIGHT 

WO small boys and a dog were hurrying 
along through the woods in the early 
spring twilight. The ice was out of the streams 
and the sap was running, but there were no leaves 
yet, only a haze of frail green like the ghost of a 
veil when you looked over the trees into the sun. 
Under the hemlocks, however, it was as shadowed 
as in June, and with the coming of night the trail 
was almost indistinguishable. The dog smelled 
it out. The small boys found it by the feel of 
their feet and by looking up and following the 
thread of open sky. They kept ever closer to- 
gether and spoke little. It was very dark and 



280 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

terrifying among those great hemlocks. The 
wind sighed eternally, like a human, overhead. 
Things unknown pattered off through the under- 
growth. The boys unconsciously broke into a 
dog-trot. 

Then suddenly ahead they saw the light of the 
clearing, beyond the swamp. The trail grew 
faintly visible, like a gray ribbon. It crossed the 
swamp brook on a bridge and wound off through 
the fringe of hard timber and over the ridge 
toward home. The water in the swamp glistened 
like quicksilver. It seemed to hold more of the 
departed day than the sky itself, which was fast 
fading into night. Out of the quicksilver the 
swamp maples and saplings reared almost indis- 
tinguishable trunks to the horizon line. Above 
that they told against the pale sky as a black 
tracery of intricate delicacy and beauty. And in 
the swamp the Pickering frogs were singing 
shrilly — phee, phee, phee • — far up above the 
limits of the human voice. Their cheerful spring 
song and the kindly presence of the clearing 
brought the little boys down to a walk again. 
They looked back into the now impenetrable 




Night 



NIGHT 281 

gloom of the hemlocks, then forward at the lovely 
black tracery of twigs against the west, and the 
sweet influences of night brooded over them as 
they went silently homeward. 

It was many years later that one of those boys 
read Shelley's 

" Swiftly walk over the western wave, 
Spirit of night ..." 

and interpreted it, as we all must interpret poetry 
and art and music, in terms of his own experi- 
ence. It was only when he reached this period of 
Shelley and self-consciousness that he realized 
how rich his experience had been, thanks to a 
country boyhood, in those sights and sounds of 
nature, when she stands intimate and revealed, 
which are the backgrounds of poetry and per- 
haps the most precious possessions of memory 
for the reader. If the mind and spirit are to give 
to art an immediate and kindled response, they 
must possess a wealth of coordinate details, the 
seed of suggestion must not fall on barren soil. 
There is, I fancy, a very real difference in the 
nature and strength of his response even to such 



282 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

a poem, say, as Arnold's " Scholar Gypsy," be- 
tween the reader who has known shy nature 
intimately in all its moods and the reader born 
and reared exclusively in such a city as New 
York. 

" But when the fields are still, 
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, 
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen 
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched 
green, 
Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest ! " 

That phrase, " the strips of moon-blanched 
green," has a peculiar magic for the reader whose 
memory holds similar pictures, who as a boy per- 
haps stole furtively out at night over the pastures 
and viewed with something akin to awe the giant 
oak that guarded the first glade of the forest. 
There it stood bathed dimly in the moonlight, 
gigantic, strange, unknown. Night and the moon 
had transfigured it, as they had transfigured the 
forest beyond ancl the open valley behind. What 
terrors did those dark woods not hold, even for 
the brave boy of twelve ? And what fairy shapes, 
too, might not glide into the moon-blanched open, 



NIGHT 283 

even the white nymphs one had read about ? And 
behind, how deep the valley lay, how far it 
stretched to the dim, silvered hills beyond! In 
all the world there was not a sound save the night 
whisperings of the leaves, the sleepy chorus of 
the crickets, and the sad call of a whip-poor-will. 
The world of day, the people and the cattle and 
the bright, friendly light, slept as if they would 
never wake. On your feet the dew was cold, and 
on your heart lay the wonder and the mystery of 
night. It was one of those moments when God 
trains His little children to be poets — or, at any 
rate, future readers of poetry! 

And how much of such training is done by 
night! In our stupid, unimaginative, grown-up 
way, we write silly little verses about the child's 
terror of the dark, or draw silly little pictures of 
it, regarding it as a mild and amiable joke. Yet 
the child's terror of the dark is often the result 
of a finer flight of imagination than any we 
grown-ups indulge, and night for the child holds 
deep, primeval mysticism and poetry. We ad- 
mire Blanco White's sonnet to night; yet it is 
essentially a child's conception to find the dark- 



284 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

ness in the light, to see in imagination the earth 
ball spin, from the shadowed side. Most of our 
literature about the child, just now so popular, is 
essentially false because it is too superficial. The 
shades of the prison-house have obliterated our 
finer recollection. And in nothing is this so pro- 
nounced as in our forgetfulness of the child's 
feeling for night, his unconsciously imaginative 
life between sunset and dawn. 

When I was a little boy, night in the mountains 
was for me a perpetual joy and terror, nor has it 
yet lost the joy nor quite all the terror. A level 
wall of nearby mountains just before the moon 
heaves up behind them and their summits are 
shivered with a mysterious light while the slopes 
are black, utter shadow, still seems to me a 
mighty, unbelievable wave bearing down upon 
me, and to this day if I am alone, far from a 
house, I have a sinking sensation of terror, and 
can with difficulty refrain from running away, 
as I did when a child. Professor James might 
tell me that sinking sensation is a physical mem- 
ory of the childish experience, and induces the 
mood of terror. He says we are often frightened 



NIGHT 285 

because we run away, not the reverse. But I 
prefer to believe otherwise; I prefer to believe 
that I can still, under cover of the night, see 
things as they are not ! 

I know at any rate that I can still stand on a 
hill, where a black cedar cuts the sky, and feel 
the earth swing eastward under the stars. Al- 
ways as a child I tried to realize that the earth 
was a ball spinning on its axis and hurtling 
through space, but my mind could never quite 
grasp the illusive picture. Then one night I 
stood upon a hilltop and felt the eastward spin. 
It all came clear in a flash of revelation. That 
first night, too, the stars were not in the sky; 
they were lamps let down on invisible wires till 
they hung just over the trees. You may see 
them that way any winter night in Florida, but 
not often in the North. I watched till I almost 
fancied they swayed in the wind. Gradually they 
were drawn up an infinite distance, and I felt the 
earth travel beneath them. I lay on my back to 
obliterate everything but the sky and the top of the 
cedar. I felt the eastward spin even more clearly 
then. Rising, I looked down at the valley lamps. 



286 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

Behind one of those window squares the grown- 
ups were playing cards. I thought them very 
silly, as I stood up there with my stars, riding the 
earth ball through space and night. I was 
the adult, the poet, the philosopher. They were 
just playing games. And yet we patronize the 
child ! 

It was at our mountain house that I used to lie 
in bed at night and watch the men go out to 
the stable with lanterns. Their great shadows 
danced fantastically on the barn wall and up 
over the roof, the legs getting hopelessly crossed 
and tangled. These grotesque pantomime per- 
formances were an endless delight. One night I 
saw a lantern bobbing up in the orchard, and got 
up myself to investigate. As I entered the or- 
chard the light was resting on the ground, and 
showed me in the midst of the inky dark the 
vague outlines of a clothes-basket, and some flap- 
ping sheets on a line. Mrs. Sheldon was taking 
down the wash. " Why? " I asked her. 

" Because it 's going to rain," she answered. 
" The mountain is talking." 

She was a thin, wiry woman, of few words, 



NIGHT 287 

who could smell rain a day off, and make excel- 
lent cookies. I went out of the circle of lantern- 
light and looked up toward Kinsman. His great, 
shaggy sides were faintly visible, looming preter- 
naturally high, a blacker patch against the black 
sky and the dim stars. The air was quite still. 
There was no wind. I listened intently, and pres- 
ently my ear caught a sound like the steady roar 
of a far-off waterfall. It was the wind rushing 
through the forests far up on those shaggy slopes. 
The mountain was holding converse with the 
gale. Down here there was no wind. Far aloft 
the gale was hurrying. It gave me a tremendous 
sensation of space and height. I fancied myself 
alone up there clinging to a dizzy ledge, while the 
gale howled about me ; and I grew faint with my 
imagined terror. But I felt, too, a curious new 
friendship for the mountain, as for a human 
thing which could communicate news of the 
weather and bid us, on a perfectly calm night, 
take in the clothes. I went to bed with entire 
confidence that I should wake up to find the 
mountains burieci in cloud and the brooks roar- 
ing. And it was even so. My evident increased 



288 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

admiration for Mrs. Sheldon, too, brought a 
fresh batch of cookies. I was a gainer all around ! 

" 'T is midnight : on the mountains brown 
The pale round moon shines deeply down." 

So sang Byron. And in college a passage in our 
rhetoric (was it not quoted from Ruskin?) 
pointed out that the poetry of this couplet resides 
in the adverb " deeply." I remember my efforts 
to explain to my room-mate why. It was so per- 
fectly apparent to me, who even as a child had 
seen our mountain intervale deepen and grow 
luminously mysterious beneath the magic of the 
moon, and the cleft on Cannon become a bottom- 
less pit. His environment had been less kind to 
him; perhaps, too, his mind was less naturally 
pictorial. If I tried to explain poetry to him, he 
had an even harder time trying to explain mathe- 
matics to me. But I feel sure that the poverty of 
his memory in coordinating details, so essential 
to the visualization of poetry, was in no small 
measure due to his urban childhood. He had 
never been turned loose on the edge of the wil- 
derness, never pushed adventurous footsteps into 



NIGHT 289 

the mystery of the mountain night or brushed 
the moonlit dew from the clearing. 

Moonlight ! How its soft, obliterating glory re- 
makes the world, and re-makes it " nearer to the 
heart's desire " ! George Moore called the songs 
of Schubert and Schumann " the moonlit lakes 
and nightingales of music ". Moonlight is the 
illumination of Romance. There is something 
lyric and lovely about it, something akin to the 
magic of the last act of " The Merchant of Ven- 
ice/' which is saturated with moonlight. Quaintly, 
too, the moon, symbol of the chaste goddess, is 
in reality the patroness of the mating passion. 
But the child as yet feels nothing of that. For 
him moonlight on familiar fields is but the reve- 
lation of a strange, mysterious, exquisite half- 
world concealed somehow in the glare of day, and 
made manifest once a month for his wonder and 
delight, when, like the good king in the carol, 
he looks out of the window after tea, 

And the snow lies round about, 
Deep and crisp and even. 

It is a different world that he sees, blue and dimly 
suffused with misty gold. The fence rails are 



290 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

reproduced on the snow as they climb over the 
ridge, and long shadows creep out from the trees 
and bushes, like spirits. As the snowy world 
rolls into distance, it grows dimmer, more mys- 
terious. It is very cold. Perhaps the child slips 
out-of-doors and stands on the snow crust, which 
squeaks faintly under his boots. There is no 
other sound. Silently, coldly, beautifully, the 
misty golden moonlight at once floods and oblit- 
erates his universe. He has a strange sensation 
of unreality, of unreality that would yet be very 
sweet could it be real. Is this not, after all, the 
essence of Romanticism? 

Once, in our same mountain home, we drove 
down the Landaff valley to see the moon rise. 
Over the ridge of Kinsman fancy could detect a 
lighter space in the dark sky, but that was all for 
several miles. The road ahead was almost in- 
visible, the horse a bobbing blur. Presently the 
light behind the mountain became more definite. 
The last slope was outlined behind a golden halo. 
Then the road plunged down between high, 
wooded banks into utter darkness, and we 
emerged, suddenly, abruptly, beyond the last 



NIGHT 291 

ridge of the mountain, into brilliant moonlight. 
The harness glittered, long shadows stretched 
westward, distances became luminous and dis- 
tinct, everything was bright and clear-cut as by 
a sudden flood of artificial light. And there at 
the left, just across the meadow in a gap of low 
hills, only a few hundred yards away, hung the 
full moon. 

" We could get out and touch it! " I cried. 

My father smiled, but he did not laugh at me. 
He was a wise man, and never laughed at chil- 
dren. " If it does n't hurry, it will get caught in 
the tree-tops," he said. 

But it escaped their entanglement, and rode 
higher and higher behind us all the way home, 
making a quiet splendor of the night. 

Could the little boy who carried this picture 
treasured vividly in his memory thereafter meet 
the word " moonlight " without an instant asso- 
ciation ? Is it sensible to suppose that such scenes 
and experiences in childhood do not color and 
enrich the whole future of the man? Our enjoy- 
ment of most things in this world depends largely 
upon our private stock of associated ideas, upon 



292 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

the extent, as it were, to which the new stimulus 
can find friends in our brain. Our enjoyment 
of art in all its forms depends tremendously upon 
the images of beauty in our memories, by which 
we test, compare and appreciate. Keats's 

" The moving waters at their priest-like task 
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. . ." 

is sheer magic only to the imagination which can 
project itself at the stately call of the verse into 
the void and see the earth ball rolling under from 
the sun while the starlight glooms its many 
waters, or which can survey, as from a great cliff, 
the dark plain of the sea and the curl of foam 
along a dim shore, stretching endlessly into the 
night. To answer the call of Keats, the imagi- 
nation must have its materials of memory to 
work with, and only nature can have supplied 
them. No one, I fancy, who has not stood at 
night high above the seashore will ever know the 
full magic of this immortal couplet. No one, too, 
whose memory does not hold a picture of that in- 
finite curve of the sea rim, who has not brooded 
upon the last red topsail sinking " below the 



NIGHT 293 

verge," will ever know the full magic of Shake- 
speare's 

" On such a night 
Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, 
Upon the wild sea banks, and waved her love 
To come again to Carthage.' ' 

The sensitive child that is permitted at all hours 
and all seasons to wander by sea margin and 
forest, over fields and under the moon, is laying 
by treasures that are not made with hands. The 
cruelty of keeping a child in the city is not alone 
a matter of his bodily health. And it is especially 
at night, when the daylight pastimes are put aside 
and the child walks hand in hand with mystery, 
that his little soul is touched, his dawning mem- 
ory stocked with immortal recollections. 

There comes a later period of life when night 
has a peculiar charm, because in some subtle way 
it seems to shut the youth into a great, sweet 
chamber of darkness, alone with his beloved. 
She may be far away, but thoughts of her bridge 
the sleeping world. He may leave her side, but 
her presence walks with him and he fears no 
prying eyes. Night is sacred to lovers no less 



294 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

than to thieves. Shall you, as long as you live, 
forget the warm chill of that dark pond across 
which you nightly paddled, while a guiding light 
was set in a window behind you ? Sometimes the 
pond was ghostly with a white mist steaming up 
into the starlight, and your body was enveloped 
while your head rose above the vapor. Now and 
then a fish jumped unexpectedly, with a flash of 
silver and a loud splash. Though it seemed light 
on the pond, and you had the lamp behind for 
beacon, the farther shore, under the woods, was 
utter black, and you made your landing by some 
primitive instinct, gliding under the shadow of the 
trees where the prow of your own canoe was in- 
visible, and hearing at the expected moment the 
friendly grate of gravel under the keel. On the 
shore a path glimmered dimly, and fireflies glinted 
in the grass. The frogs were singing. Five 
miles away you heard the faint whistle of a loco- 
motive. You yourself whistled one long-drawn 
note which went out over the water, and the lamp 
twinkling in the distant window disappeared and 
appeared again, three times. It was essential, 
you remember, that you prove you had n't been 



NIGHT 295 

drowned ! Then you felt your way home through 
the dark pines, which were warm, like a chamber ; 
felt your way unerringly, for in the night old 
powers wake, dulled by long disuse, so accustomed 
are we to depend almost exclusively on sight. We 
do not know till there is need to walk in the dark- 
ness, for instance, that the soles of our feet have 
senses. 

Again it was night when white arms released 
you, reluctant to be released, and you crossed the 
cropped lawn which bespoke a more urban neigh- 
borhood, and passed through deserted streets and 
down a short cut over the railroad tracks by the 
roundhouse. The last train from the city had 
come in, the trainmen departed. That shocking 
confession you will have to make ! But the loco- 
motives had a little steam up, and were gently 
panting as though in sleep, waiting for morning. 
There were cracks of light about the doors of 
their fire-boxes. They were warm, almost hu- 
man, and often you paused beside one, patting its 
iron flanks, as if you greeted a comrade of the 
night. A little farther on, your way took you 
past a cemetery, which by long familiarity held 



296 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

no depression. But once, very late, after the 
white arms had released you with tears for the 
terror that hot love has of its own too possible 
brevity, you saw the moon set behind that ceme- 
tery ridge — and you will never forget it. 

There is no twilight of the moon. As it catches 
in the trees before setting, a pallor comes over 
the landscape. Then the moon is seen visibly to 
plunge down out of sight, as you may see the 
long hand on a great clock jump the minutes. 
All the light shivers off the world, and instantly 
the body seems to feel a chill and the spirit a 
strange depression. At that moment when the 
moon vanished behind the desolate graveyard 
ridge, you knew a despair such as you pray you 
may never know again. The reaction from a 
perhaps too romantic passion was violent and 
abrupt. You felt " chilly and grown old." You 
knew you should never love in the future with the 
old, ardent heart of youth. That was forever 
behind you! What a pity, too, your poor heart 
held for itself! Could there be any morning for 
this black world? Almost you hoped that there 
was not. And in this new, utter dark of the spirit 



NIGHT 297 

you found a strange new thrill. Ah, happy youth 
— too happy, happy youth — it is not till later 
that the moon sets for our ardent passions and 
our hearts of hot Romance! And generally we 
are abed, soundly sleeping, and do not know that 
anything at all has happened. 

The beauty and charm of the outdoor stage 
(which is slowly gaining favor in America) are 
immeasurably enhanced by night. Under the 
kindly cover of the dark, obliterating fences, tele- 
graph poles and the neighbor's house, almost any 
garden grove may become a Forest of Arden or 
Titania's abode. Effects of illusion are possible 
which are unknown to the stage of sharp wing- 
pieces and definite proscenium. I once saw a per- 
formance of "The Old Wives' Tale " in the 
orchard back of the Radcliffe College dormitory, 
where the calcium illuminated a spot between two 
apple-trees, and the characters came and went by 
a process of drifting into the light or melting back 
into the dark. At first we heard the lost shep- 
herds hallooing in the distance, and caught the 
crunch of their feet before they drifted bewil- 
dered into the illumination. What a magic of 



298 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

mystery is here, what a fairy atmosphere, what a 
fluent, ethereal plasticity is possible, when no 
character is cut suddenly and sharply off by a 
wing-piece or a door, but all melt away or grow 
into being, like the figures in a dream ! And yet 
we sit eternally for our dramatic entertainment 
in an artificial theatre and let this magic border- 
land of drama lie unexplored ! Only the young 
people in our colleges know better. They are 
still poets and lovers of the night. 

Yet none of us is ever quite so far from child- 
hood, perhaps, that the night has wholly lost for 
him its charm and its mystery. Still it must re- 
main, at least, the symbol of the Eternal Mystery, 
which is why, possibly, we grow with advancing 
years less eager to contemplate it. But there is 
no man who does not now and then walk by night 
on the edge of the woods, where the trail is a dim 
gray ribbon, and in the moon-deepened shadows 
see the white nymphs of the Heart's Desire. 
There is no man who, on a summer night, does 
not now and then pause to listen for the myriad 
tiny sleigh-bells of the crickets, chimes of elf- 
land faintly ringing, which fall into one chord at 



NIGHT 299 

regular intervals, and bring to the heart an in- 
expressible calm, to the turbid spirit a sleepy 
hush of peace. There is no man who, some- 
where, somehow — it may be over a lawn in Cen- 
tral Park, or in his own garden, or just on the 
deserted pave of a city street — does not watch 
the moon obliterate the ugliness of the world with 
a soft suffusion of its golden light, and does not 
hear for an instant the whisper of the old Ro- 
mance. Perhaps there is no man, when " the in- 
sect cares of life " annoy and the pilgrim's pack 
is galling and heavy, who does not one night 
throw open his window and gaze into the im- 
mensity of silent space, into the great garden of 
the patient stars. The man meditates in silence, 
carried out of himself. How small he feels, and 
yet how large! How petty his selfish interests 
and worries in the face of this infinity of worlds ! 
How large his soul which can roam the inter- 
stellar spaces ! New strength pours in upon him 
from the deeps of heaven. The insect cares have 
ceased to sting, the heavy burden is forgotten. He 
is one with the brooding mystery of the night, he 
has joined Orion in the infinite march with God. 



NOV 26 1913 



300 BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS 

To-night there has been a thaw. I stepped out 
on the city square before my dwelling. The 
slushy snow, fouled almost beyond recognition 
by human traffic, lay in the gutters and in patches 
on the grass. The air was warm, almost like 
spring, but there was no spring smell in it. In- 
stead, there was a heavy, stale, dead odor, at best 
as of a world warmed over. But I looked up. 
Against the misty silver of the arc-lamps the 
trees threw a delicate tracery of black, as lovely 
as those swamp maples against the twilight when 
I was a little boy. Still higher, the electric cross 
on the church-tower blazed upon the sky like a 
constellation. The stars were overhead. It was 
late, and the city's roar was stilled. A far-off 
bell flung a chime to me over the housetops. It 
seemed as if the cows were calling from the 
upland pastures. The mind takes wings under 
the silent dome of night. Sleep is but the lesser 
part of our sunless hours, and day itself, perhaps, 
the lesser part of what in future times unguessed 
we shall most delight to remember. 



L/BRARY Of CONGRESS 



015 905 319 2 H 



